7 1/2 Minutes Solo

A torso in a striped shirt smeared into horizontal waves, a fist held out at the left edge, red trousers filling the lower half against a dark blue ground — *Movement No. 1*

Year: 2013
Medium: Long-exposure photographs on colour negative — fifteen chromogenic colour prints (RA4)
Dimensions: 28 × 23 cm each including the white border; 23 × 28 cm where the movement is horizontal
Exposure: 30 seconds per photograph, one movement per negative
Exhibited: Unterströmung, Sixtus Villa, Berlin, 2013
Credit: Courtesy of the artist

“Stretch your arm from the elbow forward, and clutch your fist. Shift slowly your weight from one leg to another, while rotating your fist.” A dancer can translate this sentences into a movement almost instantly. But how to translate contemporary dance into photography? If one enters “dance photography” in Google Image Search, hundreds of images turn up, tack sharp, showing one or more dancers with at least one leg stretched high in the air, dressed in classical costumes. If we add “contemporary” term to the previous search, only costumes change, while the dancers are still caught in “the decisive moment” of leaving the floor. As André Bazin said “the photographer creates a real light moulding, a cast with the help of a lens… opposed to the film that manages a paradox of adjusting itself to the time of an object, while at the same time creating a casting of its duration.” Is there a possibility of inscribing the movement and the passage of time into one single photograph?

A standing figure, striped shirt above and red trousers below, both dissolved into vertical smears, bare feet resolving on the floor — *Movement No. 2*

A pale arm sweeping across a near-black field, the striped sleeve resolving into hard bands at the right edge — *Movement No. 3*

7 1/2 Minutes Solo contains 15 photographs of a dancer performing a set of movements, which form a contour of a choreography. Each movement lasts for 30 seconds and resembles vocabulary used by contemporary choreographers such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Mathilde Monnier or Jérôme Bel. The movements were not simply taken over, but transformed to emphasise its trace on a single negative. Just as Bel uses “ordinary movement and non-dancers”, the performer in this piece is not a professional, but a person with higher than average motor activity. His red trousers and striped T-shirt echo the outfits worn by two dancers during rehearsal in Claire Denis film “Vers Mathilde”.

A striped torso held at the centre of the frame, the head above it dispersed into a dark smear, a red edge entering at the bottom — *Movement No. 4*

A red limb running diagonally down the frame, striped fabric breaking across the top, the rest sunk into dark blue — *Movement No. 5*

The duration of the exposure corresponded to that of the movement and was exactly 30 seconds per photograph. Through long time exposure, the whole move is recorded, both in its shape and its duration. In contrary to the film image, the motion and the time did not surrender offhand to this inscription. While they were captured on the negative, they eroded two qualities of photography: sharpness and exact colour rendition. The movement attacked the sharpness, effaced it from the whole motive and pushed it to its very base: the grain itself. Time took advantage of another weak point of the negative: different sensitivity of three colour layers to light, when exposed for a longer period of time. Where there was grey, it inscribed blue-green in the shadows, and yellow-red in the midtones. It exposed the negative as three, not as one.

The figure low and folded on the floor, the striped back arched, red showing beneath it, the ground a flat blue-grey — *Movement No. 6*

Head and shoulders resolving out of the blur, both hands raised into the hair, the striped shirt holding its bands across the lower frame — *Movement No. 7*

The figure seen from above, crouched, both hands spread flat on the floor and repeated by the exposure, the head a dark mass at the top — *Movement No. 8*

What is left of the image, when the erosion was done? If we think of erosion as washing away, then with the lack of sharpness and neutrality of colour, the movement became clear in its ephemerality, unable to be caught, emphasised as a trace left. It is a remembrance of what moved, touched us when we perceived that movement, from the moment when the last toe left the floor until the first toe touched it again. Movements form vocabulary, where repetition is encouraged. Instead of being labeled as candidates with one of them included as the pick and others left as rejects, similar motives possess equal value with their own rhythm, timbre and tone.

The figure lying along the floor, red and striped fabric run together into one mass, an arm extended away to the left — *Movement No. 9*

Red spread across almost the whole frame as a soft field, a striped sleeve entering at the upper left, a bare foot resolving at the lower right — *Movement No. 10*

The figure standing left of centre, the striped shirt breaking into fine ripples that carry on across the pale field beside it — *Movement No. 11*

The head resolving almost sharply at the right edge, the rest of the body drawn out to the left as a wide field of horizontal ripples — *Movement No. 12*

A striped torso standing at the right, the fist carried out to the left, red trousers below, the ground reading almost black — *Movement No. 13*

The figure upright and nearly still, red trousers holding their shape, the striped shirt vibrating above them, bare feet on the dark floor — *Movement No. 14*

A near-dark frame, the movement surviving only as pale striped ripples across the upper half — *Movement No. 15*