Sebastian Buerkner

Turf Waltz  

24.02.07 - 25.03.07

Preview Friday 23rd February 7-9pm

-------------------------------------------------

Turf Waltz , is a new animated video installation by Sebastian Buerkner, created for Whitechapel Project Space.

Consisting of two projected streams of imagery, Turf Waltz builds on Buerkner's use of Micromedia Flash animation to create the dual portrayal of an individual recollection of one day's events. The formal characteristics of Flash's readymade digital surfaces render such narratives and events with an abstracted flatness - fluid and almost entropic changes in focus, viewpoint and time that articulate the hierarchies and orders of memory, and illustrate a glimpse into a protagonist's subconscious.

Throughout Buerkner's films the animated space is visibly assembled and deconstructed through the use of repetition and fractious, often stroboscopic, editing. Turf Waltz continues to explore the forced collusion of the viewer in a process of mental and physical accumulation and association. The almost hallucinogenic revisiting of objects and scenery as the building blocks of memories, creates a surrealism of false associations and pairings, sequences restarting, and rearranging, and mimicking the formation of chains of memory.

Within the two-screen projection of Turf Waltz, such fragments of memory retain coded narratives that, in physical opposition, operate like a schizophrenic standoff. Despite a central thrust towards a final shared scene/destination, the two streams never quite reveal their relationship to each other. The work presents a series of narrative possibilities - a recollection of a shared experience by two friends, or that of one person remembered at different times and in different emotional contexts.

Turf Waltz investigates the dislocation of senses both as a narrative device, and as a physical experience. Whilst drawing on Beckettian levels of frustration and repetition, and the surreal filmic streams of conscious of Hans Richter, the use of such contemporary media as a disarmingly seductive and aesthetic approximation of thought processes, stimulates a discourse around disassociation, and how we experience subjectivity.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sebastian Buerkner has recently completed a commission for animate!, screened on Channel 4. He has had solo exhibitions at LUX at Lounge Gallery, London, and at Kohlenhof Kunstverein Nurnberg, Nuremberg. He has also exhibited in group shows and screenings at Site Gallery, Sheffield, Tate Liverpool, Barbican, London, and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna.

Turf Waltz has been realized with kind support from The Elephant Trust and