Vresna Prekopic
10 January 2012
There is something Lynch-esque about the whole experience. Although the room I walk into is black, not maroon velvet, it nevertheless feels like encountering the dancing dwarf in Twin Peaks. Hypnotic and disturbing.I sit down to the far left on the hard bench and my gaze is transfixed to the screen. Two synchronised, parallel projections. To the left, in colour: A princess. A queen. A man in embroidered velvet. To the right, in black and white: A woman at a desk, a typewriter, the room filled will paper, on the desk, on the floor.Four characters, all part of the same person. The three adults talk, but the girl is a silent image from memory who moves perpetually through corridors, staircases, labyrinths. The woman in the room wants to tell us her story, in her own way, in her own words. It takes a while for me to realise that she is locked in. A mattress on the floor behind her, a locked door and a barred window. Under surveillance.After arriving back home, I read about the installation and learned that the work was inspired by Queen Christina and that extracts from her letters and aphorisms were used in the monologues and dialogues.In my view, that makes no difference, because it is myself I see and hear.”What do you see when you look yourself in the mirror?”I am absorbed by the dialogue between the writing woman and the long-deceased queen, which portrays the need to create our own voice, to recreate our own memories and our reality. Being born to something we do not choose ourselves, yet trying to reclaim the image of ourselves. There is no boundary between dream and reality, between imagination and memory, between fact and fiction, and that is what keeps me pinned to that bench. For are we not all in that borderland? By trying to control language about me, by me, it is I, and no one else, who decide over that which will be me.And this is exactly what I want to experience, when I experience art – fiction and reality so close together that it is impossible to know which is which.
Translated from swedish by Gabriella Berggren