DISTANCES

The eye. It´s obvious – the diffrence between seeing and being seen. The associative field is endless. Examples abound: the myriad nuances of the interplay between artist and viewer; Polyphemos blinded by Ingen (No – one); the charge of heavy symbolism from both Spanish surrealism and Russian realism filling the film; and… Because Anna Nordquist Andersson constructs her works in a forcefield of myths and realities, I want to start by limiting it to one single decisive image sequence. One movement only when, in Sommaren med Monica (One summer with Monica), Harriet Andersson unexpectedly turns from a facial close-up and looks into the camera towards the cinema audience. The viewer viewed. Perspective and position reversed, as well as the proportions. For what we´re talking about here is in fact relationships. While they can be discussed in social, structural or personal terms, distance is no less important. For distance determines the movement´s intensity simultaneously distancing and approaching in the manner Anna Nordquist Andersson demonstrated in her work Bälg (Bellows) at Galleri Ping Pong in Malmö. This was a performance where the prospect became the everyday life outside. A close-up, through one simultaneously seen through an apparatus thus creating distance. The same with space captured by the camera. Segments moved to another place. Then suddenly close-ups of distant perspectives again, which at the same time are experienced as increasingly dizzying. These are removes that perforate space, settings and accepted contexs. The eye carves rooms inside rooms, a process predicated on movement and shifts much like a labyrinth. There you are confined within repetitions while the space opens upwards. It´s like a double-exposure of the Knossos labyrinth and Icarus´fall, two sides of the same myth. All this comes about by turning the eye into the camera, this the eye of technology, this mechanical eye. By cutting segments of rooms and moving them to other rooms, by shortening distance but retaining the effect of the distant perspective. The opposite then becomes the truncated spaces in the labyrinth and interrupted conceptions. The eye imprisoned in the present. A close-up as well, one that would only be too glad to change places with an uninterrupted movement, were it only possible.

Thomas Millroth