Runa Islam
MUMOK
Empty the pond to get the fish (2008) is a new 32mm film installation by 2008 Turner Prize nominee Runa Islam. Like her previous works – two of which are also shown at MUMOK, Be the first to see what you see as you see it (2004) and First day of spring (2005) – the new film explores the materiality of celluloid, the sense of anticipation and desire associated with the medium, and the way in which the camera eye creates meaning.
Empty the pond to get the fish is shot in Vienna’s Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts and explores both the architecture of the institution and the art works it displays. Using slow pans and a skillfully crafted soundtrack, Islam emphasizes the mechanical subjectivity of the camera’s eye. Moving vertically and then horizontally, but always with extreme precision, Islam evokes a highly ordered gaze that is part human, part mechanical.
That gaze lingers over abstract frames and textures: the surface of a steel-framed window; the wood-inlaid walls of a theatre; the blank white of a cinema screen. Initially, these close-ups produce an image that seems purely abstract, and without specific meaning. Islam gradually pulls the camera back, and slowly concrete meaning is attached to the abstract image: theatre seats are revealed; empty cases await art works; museum technicians install a painting.
Then a shot of light emerges from the cinema projection booth. Islam creates a theatre – whether it is the auditorium or a museum gallery – in which there is a distinct connection between the space of exhibition and the anticipation of the event. That the revelation of the art work itself is the implied event is integral to the final logic of this work.
The same idea of anticipation is evoked in Be the first to see what you see as you see it, which features the methodical destruction of various china objects that are also displayed in a gallery setting. Here again, there is a distinct sense of a causal relationship between exhibition and anticipation. The anticipated event here is, of course, not the revelation but the breaking of the displayed object.
Empty the pond to get the fish never quite reaches the event itself, apart perhaps from that brief flash of light in the cinema. That deferral is one of the more interesting choices of the work, in that the gallery remains a work in progress, and the challenge of the art work – to address the momentous charge of anticipation – is neither tested nor failed. Instead, it remains an open field, and Islam reminds us that half of artistry is in the creation of setting – in the construction of the theatre, and of desire itself.
Katie Kitamura
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