ROKOLECTIV

AND OTHER STORIES

Rokolectiv commissioned six new works dealing with different forms of narration and storytelling in video art. An unforeseen timespace journey from ancient Rome to Manila.

Works by: Selin Davasse, Jared Marks, Natasha Tontey, Stephanie Comilang, Larisa Crunteanu, Nona Inescu.

Visit the exhibition here.

Performance artist Selin Davasse's Homo Economicus is a stand-alone edit of a song telling the story of the financial struggles and hopes of a young artist to sculptures of Greek gods in the Altes Museum in Berlin. A self-reflective narration with a touch of camp.

In False Door, Jared Marks takes viewers through a blurry assemblage of recognizable video formats. Threaded throughout is a fictional narrative around the talking statues of Rome where medieval Romans could anonymously express unpopular or subversive opinions.

Natasha Tontey’s My Syrupy Mistake is a stripped-down and abstract fictional deconstruction of the basic narrative of Planet of the Apes. As an attempt to observe a story of human behaviour in mastering the nonhuman primates, the video also shows the possibility of resilience and resistance of the other beings in the Primates order. Soundtrack by Divisi62.

The ruins of colonial architecture are the backdrop for this new short video by Stephanie Comilang which mixes narratives around “made-up” languages from the Philippines and the Babaylan pre-colonial shamans. Soundtrack provided by Mobilegirl and Chino Amobi.

In Under the Bridge, Larisa Crunteanu takes on space as both liminal and heterotopic. None of this story is visible, but all of it relies on its placement there, on a ‘tram island’, under the bridge. An exercise in slow ontology and a poststructuralist proposal of a stop-frame of space as a projection surface.

In Primal Astrology, Nona Inescu overlaps the narratives humans create for themselves through astrology—as a means for a deeper understanding of their existence—with footage of animals held in captivity in a zoo. Their destiny is to be trapped forever in an enclosure, much like the belief that one’s future and defining traits are written in the stars, predetermined by a perpetual astrological cycle.