Uncontained Images, 2017/18, five-chanel video installation, animations from drawings on book pages
Uncontained Images is an audio/video installation, composed of five different animated films created by drawing frames from different film sequences. Photographs of the drawn drawn frames (usually connected by motif, genre, theme or author) are then integrated in a frame-by-frame animation, whose surrounding are covers and pages of books from the period of self-menagement socialism in the SFR Yugoslavia. The animations are infinite loops, that is, they are cyclical articulations of time in infinite motion. Al five videos have separate sounds that mix and complement each other in space. These are the sound of a machine (trains), the sound of waves and the sound of book pages turning at speed.
The animated film that shows a train was made from sequences of the films such as From Russia With Love (1963), Billion Dollar Brain (1967), Emperor of the North (1973), Runaway Train (1985) etc., which are drawn on books such as The Collected Works of Josip Broz Tito and large biography of Tito in three volumes, under title Tito-Party. The sequence representing hands in the endless shift of relaxing and clenching fists is from the film The Wrong Man (1967) and is placed on page of the book that documents the Tenth Congress of the League of Communism of Yugoslavia. A kiss was drawn after a scene from film Rich and Strange (1932) on pages of Encyclopedia of Self-Management. The sequence that depicted pistol was found in film The Big Combo (1955) and was drawn on book Social Criticism by Edvard Kardelj, one of the creators of self-management socialism. A pistol comes out from under the raincoat and is pulled back just at the moment when it is pointed at the observer. The fifth video records the motif of waves, taken from the film Clash by Night (1952), and its background are the collected works by two ideologists of self-management socialism, Veljko Vlahović and Edvard Kardelj.
The selected film sequences are drastically recontextualized here. As such, they are almost entirely separated from their sources. They make one of two layers within the screen of the audio/video installation itself. The relation between the drawn layer created by covering the film sequence with drawings, and the layer of books from socialist period of Yugoslavia presents time, or a kind of time logic. It is the logic of movement and, as such, represents an analysis of a certain motion. The relation between the layers, but also their relations with the observer’s time, as asymmetrical. Namely, what is happening in the animated film is only perceptively connected with the observer, while the way in which they will experience it is completely left to them. In this way, Uncontained Images re/examines the nature of the narrative and symbolic potentials of the moving image which each of us experiences in our own way and in accordance with our memory, sense of humor or current situation.