The Unhomely
Atiéna R. Kilfa's exhibition 'The Unhomely', which I saw in February at the Camden Art Centre, left a lingering impression on me.
As I approached the exhibition's main room, I recall feeling unsettled by an eerie drone-like noise. The emanating sound was like the hum of an overworked fan, intensified to make the viewer feel deeply unwelcome. Upon entering the room, the initial sight of electrical cords exposed behind a wall of LED screens, exacerbated the hostile welcome. Having previously been shown at KW in Berlin, I was interested in seeing how the installation would translate to the space at Camden. I was also interested in experiencing how the work would deal with both cinematic and perceptual space through the union of film and installation. Integrated around the LED wall is a wooden stage which elevates and delineates the viewer's movement through the work. Once placed on the stage, you feel compelled to walk across it towards the film on the screen at the other end.
The film unfolds across one continuous shot in a stairwell where two figures dwell in an unnerving state of tension. It was the uncanny stillness of the man and woman and their avoidance of each other's presence which startled me at first. They appear stilted and somewhat mannequin-like, but then not entirely fake either, which makes their avoidance feel even more strange. Their body language, especially of the woman who rests in a gentle position on the steps, suggests absence and loss. I was given the sense that these two people had been rendered inarticulate by trauma, perhaps inflicted by the stairwell's memory of something horrific. It's unclear whether the memory is recent, or even whether the film itself is located in present time. There are only a few incidental details within the frame that hint at the past, such as the ornate detailing of the stairwell railing and the 1950s-like formal attire of the figures, while the occasional ring of an old landline phone is left ignored. The work seems to deal with overlapping states of time: the frozen state of the figures, the languid time that flows over the course of the film's continuous loop, and the viewer's time as they navigate the work.
The controlled formal quality of Kilfa's film made me think of Chantal Akerman's work, particularly Jeanne Dielman. Both films force the viewer to feel the flow of time over a long take confined to one domestic space, while showing little details that express tension. In Akerman's film, the tension is fulfilled with a final act of violent revenge at the end of the film. It feels overtly fictive in contrast to the literalness of the domestic scenes which come to define the film. The violence in Kilfa's film never reaches a climax, it's continuous and ongoing: present.
There was something that compelled me to navigate the work by moving across the stage in time with the camera's movement. It was as though I was the camera itself, attempting to make sense of the tense drama before me. With every step that I took, the loud creaks of the stage's recycled floorboards added further animation to the film's drama. I felt self conscious of drawing attention to my lonely presence within the installation. As a subsequence, I guess the presence of the creaks added another overlapping tension to the film's blurred distinctions between space and time. The 'unhomely' gallery environment made me feel complicit in the violence implied by the film.
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| View from stage elevation |