Sway a way

“…if you lose a thing the retrieval of what you think you have lost becomes that thing the facts of loss become the content…” writes Artun Alaska Arasli in the unpunctuated text accompanying the exhibition. His keen remark also applies to Maximova’s second video. In Sway a way, the film from a cell phone falling down an aircraft, GoPro cameras getting lost in the ocean, tumbling down rivers, or picked up by birds, come together in a continuous filmic whirlpool. Sampling these accidental excerpts from a camera operator’s diary, Maximova’s montage of found footage is the lockdown exercise of a contemporary kinok. Cameras severed from the body of their GoPro Heroes, turn the I into a machine, as the lost mechanical eye becomes the protagonist of a disembodied point of view. However, what we observe on the overheard screen of her installation is not an autonomous mechanical vision, but rather, the more-than-human world with a movie camera. Its disorienting cinematography fueled by Joeri Bultheel’s atmospheric score could be what happened if Jean Painlevé had Crittercams to make his surrealist Neo-Zoological Dramas. But, there is something more mediated about Maximova’s video; something about the spiral of life merging with the vortex of the internet as we imagine her searching the web to collect other-worldly sequences.
Emile Rubino

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