12 Feb 2018

Nida Sinnokrot exhibition at KIOSK

Film maker and installation artist Nida Sinnokrot (1971, USA) presents a series of sculptural and cinematic installations in the KIOSK rooms. Some of the works on display are new, others were reinterpreted for this particular context, but all of them speak of the history, representation or political potential of 'machines', like photographic or cinematographic devices. Brought together in a single exhibition space under the title 'Exquisite Rotation', they will combine into a new, synchronized gesture.

The works in the show shed light on a different way of looking in which the linear time and fixed perspective that we associate with the traditional big screen, the photographic lens or the projection screen are disrupted. Sinnokrot aims to transcend the mechanisms of mass media such as photography and film, countering them with an array of new, critical narrative strategies. One of these is his recurrent attempt to capture several layers of implicit meaning in a single powerful, abstract image or poetic experience.

His camera functions as a tool to speak about his native country, displacement and the relation between technology and colonialism. In this sense, his desire to liberate the cinematic machine as we know it, is also an expression of his own hybrid identity. Sinnokrot is currently based in Jerusalem but, as the son of Palestinian parents, he spent his childhood in Algeria and moved to the United States as a teenager.

The exhibition is focused around a central installation in the dome room where moving images are projected horizontally instead of vertically, and the projection speed is determined by the interaction with the viewers. With each step, the film registers scratches, starting an irreversible process of deterioration. Sinnokrot describes this 'horizontal cinema' as a tool to address the material reality of violence and its mediation, manipulation and circulation: 'This violence is reflected in the machine itself and the relationship between trauma and perception is materialized in its clash of technologies and systems. It's cinema and war. It's the experience of dispossessed and displaced peoples.'