2010 Baloise Art Prize winner, Claire Hooper is presenting her prize-winning video Video Nyx (2010), at mumok, on view through 8 January 2012, as part of a trilogy which also includes two works from 2011, Aoide and Eris. In her films, the British artist (born 1978) interweaves narratives from the present with characters and concepts from Greek mythology. These become elements of a kaleidoscopic mélange of reality and fiction, in which Hooper, in the manner of a Nouveau Roman, also dispenses with the linear succession of past, present and future.
Claire Hooper, Nyx, 2010. Filmstill. Foto: Claire Hooper © Claire Hooper.
Nyx, 2010
Nyx, named after the goddess of the night, takes its viewers on the psychedelic journey of the young man Furat. He cannot understand why he is intoxicated after ‘just two beers’, and his nocturnal U-Bahn journey home turns into a trip through the underworld. The film is set in the stations of U-Bahn line 7, designed by Rainer Rümmler between 1971 and 1984, along the route between Neukölln, the Turkish neighbourhood of Berlin – and Spandau. Hooper had already filmed the imaginative architecture of these underground stations with their many art deco and oriental style details in 2008 in her video Nach Spandau, where she almost voyeuristically pictured the stations one by one at night and mainly empty. In Nyx they become the scene of Furat’s journey, which begins with an encounter with Thanatos, the god of peaceful death, his twin brother Hypnos, the god of sleep, and the latter’s wife Pasithea, goddess of hallucination. In the course of his journey the young man meets many more mythical figures of the night, all in contemporary dress, including Eris, the goddess of strife and discord, and her children, among them the goddesses of oaths, falsehoods and ruin. At first Furat thinks that the oracle god Morpheus, who is responsible for the appearance of people in dreams, is his mother warning him of the dangers of the night, as do Nemesis, the goddess of justful revenge, and the Erinyes, the goddesses of retribution, who here appear like R & B stars in music videos. Intermingled with the flow of Furat’s experiences and visions are the ritual slaughter of a goat in a Kurdish village and the bas-relief battle scenes of the Pergamon altar – as a relic of the culture of his ancestors, kept in Berlin. Philotes, the goddess of friendship and also a creature of the night, finally brings Furat’s odyssey to an end, accompanying him out of the subterranean depths back into the pulsating life of the metropolis Berlin.
Aoide, 2011
A non-linear interweaving of the present and memory, as the basis of a construction of a past and history, is also a feature of Aoide, named after the muse of the finished poem. The film was made in 2011 in and for the Munich exhibition space
www.mumok.at
