Handstand
1992
Film, 210 x 280 x 9.3 cm.
Materials: 16mm film, projection table, loop system, projection wall
Collection: De Vleeshal Collection, Middelburg (The Netherlands) (Inv. no. VH0279).
A girl with brown curls, wearing a white dress, comes barefooted into frame. She does a handstand against a white brick wall. Her frock slowly glides along her legs towards her waist, revealing her white panties and stopping just at her breasts. Next, the girl brings her legs back to the ground and she disappears from view. A bit later she returns in-frame again and repeats the same handstand. This short film runs in a loop, so that the event endlessly repeats itself. A certain rhythm is established, and this has a hypnotizing effect on viewers. Initially, the event seems casual and commonplace. After watching for a while, however, the girl’s body appears to morph into a moving, abstract form. The endless repetition also makes the image elusive: it is at once familiar and strange, full of tension – tension, for instance, between the visible and the non-visible, between the tender and the untouchable.
Marijke van Warmerdam tells no story here. She shows a process, an action. This action takes place in silence. Time elapses slowly, but also seems to arrest – the film does not ‘progress’. Here the artist maintains a fixed camera-viewpoint, by which she herself remains in the background. In the presentation of the piece, however, this neutrality is partially lifted by virtue of the projectors (an integral part of the work) being left visible, not hidden away. In this way, as visitors we ourselves walk in and out of the projection, and almost become part of it.
