Helene Black: 2002 :: 2nd International Art Biennial - Buenos Aires. Culture in Crisis

Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Group Show
Curated by Jorge Glusberg

Editing: Helene Black and Yiannis Colakides
DVD Authoring: Yiannis Colakides
Still Photography: Adonis Florides
© 2002, Limassol, Cyprus: Helene Black and Yiannis Colakides

Screenings
7 Nov – 7 Dec 2002 : v1 (Dual projection), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina
13 Nov – 14 Dec 2002 : v1 (Dual projection) Diatopos Gallery, Nicosia, Cyprus
2003 : v3 (Single video) Museum of New Art, Denver, USA

In ‘Sleep Watches You’, Helene Black gives a metaphorical twist to the notion of embalmment: the desire for preservation. She sweetly folds in and stores the residue of memory, while evoking the social and psychic implications of this desire. It asks what is buried within ‘Sleep Watches You’, what are the technologies of reproduction and transmission deployed here preserving from oblivion? There are 2 screens, one a bed of salt, invoking the salt lakes in Cyprus, and mutated to become a screen for a projection of a young woman sleeping. As if in time lapse, the visual residue of each shifting pose is held into the next. The kind of bed that Beckett would write in reference to a ditch, ‘…just wide enough for one, on it no two ever meet.’
On the second screen behind this ‘bed’ images of Cypriot women both Turkish and Greek are morphed, each becoming the deep shadow of the next, intercepted by static, by images and sounds of a massive explosion, and the heavy thud of metal slabs driven together. But also by subtitles, which ask for ambiguity, not the fixity of two, of one or the other, of two becoming one. ‘Sleep Watches You’ is marked by the artists immigration from Cyprus to Australia as a child, then her migration back to a country, divided. Yet this biographical trace is also submitted to a sleeping state – sleep itself being a kind of embalmment which, for the viewer of ‘Sleep Watches You’ may also evoke the liminality of waking.
(Denise Robinson is an Independent Curator and writer, based in London, previously Head of Artistic Programme at Arnolfini, Bristol and director of Australian Centre for Photography.)