In her new series Bilocation, Marianne Csaky works with found images again. The works are based on 5 frames taken from an old celluloid film which was obviously shot somewhere in Europe at a family event. The film depicts spontaneous, unarranged scenes in an intimate(?) and also tense(?) situation.
As we all know, spontaneous community gatherings have their specific and well-identifiable spatial dynamics and rituals, just as home movies have their specific aesthetics and visual constructions, by which we instictively locate what we see in time and space. The other layer of the works, the charcoal drawing adds an extra feature to the scenes: a young Korean woman who acts as if she were taking part in the original scene but, at the same time, she still keeps herself outside the scene, at a certain distance.
The Asian woman is involved in the original situation as the artist’s alter ego, observes and reacts to what is happening in the pictures. At the same time, her gaze as well as the fact that she is drawn with charcoal, a medium that is different from that of the photo, she is also distanced from the original scene. The characters of the two layers, the photo and the charcoal drawing, look at the same situation from different points of view, I would say, from different places.
The visual construction of this work refers to the difference in the interpretations of people who live at different geographic locations and in different cultures. However, the artist uses the notion of personal cultural background as a very personal and complex phenomenon that is not defined automatically and exclusively by a certain geographical location, culture or nationality. At the same time, it refers to the artist as a wanderer, a “homo viator”, using Nicolas Bourriaud’s term, to the artist who is continuously on the go, travelling from one place to the other, from one culture to the other, being inside and outside at the same time. This mental and physical state, this form of living adds new aspects to the process of interpreting and re-interpreting and, by this means, it also provides remedy and release from fixed notions and images.