INKYUNG WHANG

 I like video art when it illustrates artist's storytelling of archival work connected from their narrative to macrocosm.

William Kentridge - The Refusal of Time in Whitechaeple gallery is a good example as Elizabeth Price – K at the infinite mix.

 

 The Refusal of Time is five channel video projections with installation. As entering the installation room, Kentridge’s voice and dialogue forms the power of presence. The sound coming out of steel megaphones perfectly meets nostalgic light from projections in the dark on panoramic image. It weaves information of fatalistic life ceremony and scientific paradigm. It turns to journey for cycle of life, journey to space travel and journey across historical events. They present time as duration. Kentridge is walking across 5 channel screen and a crowd of people are marching like carnival parade as if it is our fate in the time of universe. Projection light once drops on the screen like tears for nothing or meteor shower.

 

 A big machine is another performer occupying in the middle of the room. It almost seems to be generated by sound. Simultaneously, its theatrical movement manifests sense of sound. It stands dominantly and moves dramatically in a sequence like a highly functioning loom responding to worker’s time.

The installation looks like a dance stage for destined ceremony at some point. Then it transmits to the sound collage of time clicking, piano device, metronome beats and machine operating. Here sound is so powerful to turn to the being in space.

 

 Over its running time, I still belong to the room like timber on the wall or wooden box at the corner. Maybe time in Thick Time is not time as duration. It is probably the refusal of conventional time, the concentrated time in one’s presence.