Operation over Distance
HD Video, 14:16min,
silent with partial sound.
2017-2024.
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Operation over Distance begins in the story about an iconoclastic attack that took place in 1905 at the museum Alte Pinakothek in Munich.
The museum guard walks the routine route across the large exhibitions halls when the guard notices something unusual with one of the painted portraits. In Albrecht Dürer's self-portrait the once so intense lustre of the eyes had turned matte. When taking a closer look at the painting it became clear that someone had scraped the surface with a sharp object, aiming at the eyes. But the attacker must have left since there was no one in sight, and until now it is still unclear who did this attack and why.
Since it is still unknown to us, how and why the attack was carried out, we can only speculate through an archaeology of the portrait, where the marks on the portrait’s face is a clear evidence of the act that makes matter move. These were not the usual marks from an iconoclastic act grounded in an ideological persuasion, but a resistance acted out in a state of emergency, petrified by the persistent eye of the image. We are at once faced with the outward look of the image itself, the look directed at us. The animated surface speaks about the spectators fear of becoming a petrified object and what it takes to uphold the boundaries between us and them.
The work takes a special interest in our desire to live through the image and how it constantly operates through resemblances, in an operation over distance.
© Joel Danielsson & Louise Öhman