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If you look out of the window, what do you see?
| Video Installation, 2023 || A window, Single channel 4K, 11:00 minutes |
A real window, A projection, A slide show clicks, snapshots images who look real but are generated by AI, A screen saver, the view is constantly changing into fictional places who look familiar. -
STORMY NIGHT
| Interactive Video Game, 2022 || Download for iOS/Android, About 60 minutes |
Stormy Night is an interactive story game in which the viewer chooses their path inside a three-dimensional space. Each room hides one of the story chapters. Navigating their way through a sleepless night, the participants unfold a flexible narrative, questioning the online space, linear thinking and truth. The multi-layered story reveals the tension between the personal inner world and the outside virtual one, while the journey through the sculptural architecture resembles the labyrinth of online information. In between reality and fiction, processed media images from the physical and virtual world peep through the windows. More Info -
space-dot-com
| 360-Dgree video, 2020 || 10:00 minutes |
space-dot-com is a collaborative project by Sharon Paz and Mikala Hyldig Dal. The work addresses conceptions of ownership in urban space, referencing the political context of gentrification on a local and global scale including the topic of space, ownership and exploitation/solidarity towards interstellar colonialism, dark matter and black holes. The project reflects on worldwide processes of wealth generation and the pushing out of tenants to peripheral areas of the city or into homelessness. space-dot-com integrates the altered living conditions during Covid-19 such as how our bodies are defined in relation to shrinking spaces and how social isolation is expanding. In this we explore the possibility of rethinking redistribution policies and profoundly restructuring power relations. Both the 360° video and the augmented reality installation creates a fusion between performance, real space and virtual elements. Avatars embody "the politics of space" in a form of absurd play on inner and outer space as ultimate philosophical categories.
Project by: Mikala Hyldig Dal and Sharon Paz, In collaboration with: Augmented Archive, Music: Korhan Erel, Text excerpts: Baudrillard, Bifo, Maternal Fantasies, Mietstreik Jetzt!, The Invisible Committee. -
SAND DUNE
| 360 Degree Video, 2018 || Single Channel HD, 8:50 minutes |
The 360-degree video places the viewer within a sand dune inside a forest. The work investigates the clash between the two different landscapes, the stitching points between the dry desert and the green woods. The work present traces of alienation, detachment and miss fit to the environment around. The idea of an isolated island is in contrast to inclusion. Nature is contrasted with the use of emojis, which are simplified symbols that present emotions and a reduction of a language. The dancers perform a ritual, they are being observed, the scenario is abstract, a dance, a search, a parade, a ceremony bring them to the muddy water. -
THE RIGHT TO LEAVE
| Video, 2013 || Single Channel HD, 4:00 minutes loop |
Thematically speaking, the work deals with processes of migration. A train, which consists of so-called mobile “Raumerweiterungshalle” or “Room Expansion Halls” (REH) made in the GDR, leads past snowy forests and desert landscapes, then stops again at the point of departure surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Inside, the inmates play the well-known children’s game musical chairs. The principle of free migration, the right to leave and to seek a country of one’s own choosing, is here represented in contrary dynamics. Global freedom of movement is represented in the video as limited by borders and as a cycle of emigration and forced return that is difficult to break. Open immigration as a human right is only available to the few who are chosen in the selection process. The chairs of the projection invite the beholders to become a shadowy part of the endless travelling and returning. -
OPEN PRISON
| Video, 2013 || Single Channel HD, 3:16 minutes loop |
The work was done during a residency in Suomenlinna, the fortress on Helsinki’s islands. The video brings together the different layers of the history and the present into one panoramic view. The viewer eye travel through images of the past military base, the harsh civil war mixed with today tourism attraction and open prison with prisoners working to rebuild the site, all in the same place. The work is a collage of frozen moments from different points in the near and far past. -
COMMON CARRIERS
| Video, 2008 || Single Channel DVD, 7:20 minutes |
The video documents a simple action of a men and a woman with there belongings, being carried by another person. The action is a transaction of man working power creating an alternative way of transportation to the once we are familiar with in everyday situation. A mixture of intimate and physical action is creating a humoristic performance in the public space. Blurring the borders between employment and exploitation. -
THE DOOR KEEPER
| Video, 2006 || Single Channel DVD, 2:45 minutes |
In the center of the video is a man walking with a door through the city. He is passing in construction sites, abandon places and destroyed houses. The doorkeeper guards a door that does not lead anywhere, a door that is a left over from his home. -
MINOR PROTEST
| Video, 2004 || Single Channel DVD, 1:15 minutes |
Born into predefined borders place us without choice on one side or another. Both physical and mental borders, some we struggle to change and others we accept as part of our reality. The video presents this territorial border, a border that reduces the space one can move in or pass through. A man performs a series of minor protests that strive to change this “fictional” reality. -
WANDERING HOME
| Video, 2003 || Single Channel DVD, 4:00 minutes |
The video piece Wandering Home strives to re-define the notion of ‘home.’ It explores the ways in which we experience the ‘home’; how we perceive it, not only with regard to its contents, namely the objects within it, but also with respect to the exterior, to everything that it is not. Is a home a nest or a fortress, a shelter or a refuge, a dwelling place or a place from which we dream of the outside? Through these quandaries the piece sketches a house gradually emptied – visually as well – of its concepts, of the objects populating it, and abandoned. Concurrently, the exterior is in constant motion, reflected through the house windows as a sequence of nature, freedom and space. The viewer’s gaze shifts from the interior to the exterior, from the house that is no longer a ‘home’ to the constantly moving outdoors. (Text by Sahar Shalev)“For our house is our corner of the world.”- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1958
Sharon Paz
Artist