dimensions variable
duration 18 min

The Wall
Text by Adina Popescu

“We define aura as a unique phenomenon at a distance, however close it might be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon, or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you breathe in the aura of those mountains, of that branch.”
Walter Benjamin

Upon walking into the exhibit space in the Museum of Modern Art in Sydney, where the Icelandic artist Egill Saebjörnsson’s „The Wall“ is on display, you find yourself before a 3x4 m. gray wall with a plastic grocery bag and a pink jacket fastened onto it. Underneath a cardboard box is displayed. That’s it. The grey wand stares at us—for a long while—until it gradually and imperceptibly starts to flicker. Here the video comes in with a picture of the box and the plastic bag and jacket hanging on the wall projected over these things themselves. Reality is overlaid with its own representation. By means of this doubling the wall becomes literally animated: be-souled, awoken to life. We marvel at it with wide-open eyes. This is the stance observers usually take to Egill Saebjörnsson’s installations. We’ll see an umbrella flying by, red light or clouds drifting across the sky. Blue fog suddenly will rise from the plastic bag, causing a racket as it in turn calmly disseminates into the picture only to disappear completely. In the fog you’ll no longer be able to tell what’s part of the video, or the foreground from the background. The layers have woven themselves together, and the space of the observer has become the space of the picture and vice versa. Jacket, plastic bag and box are still there, as they always will be—and yet the imagination ignites upon contact with them. There is no turning back. The work is here, and yet somewhere else. Video-works are always, like painting, a window onto another world. At the same time they are parts of this prevailing space, due to their frame or to the concreteness of the TV-set playing them. Egill Saebjörnsson brings this principle to a head by completely dissolving the frame so that the imaginary world can break into our own, just as the objects of the real world are lifted from the context of their functional significance and so become part of the artistic work.
Yet it’s ultimately about much more than a space of experience: what Egill Saebjörnsson really puts into question is the way we generally have sensory experiences. Here Egill re-stages a relation to visibility and brings this itself into experience—an experience never perceived, as we are always ourselves already in this relation.