Installation views
The Eleventh Hour
An inevitable fact of human existence: loss. Nobody escapes it. Few welcome it. Loss presents us with tremendous obstacles. Profound personal loss never seems to come at the ‘right’ time. But it may come just in time: at the eleventh hour. Miraculously, for the brave, loss can be a gift; It can set us free, it can make us grow.
This dual channel installation presents a search, at twilight. One or more figures loom in the gathering darkness: a search party, combing through a landscape. Who are they? Who is lost? What or who are they looking for? What if the search party is, itself, lost? The word ‘search’ derives from the Greek ‘kirkos’ – circle. The search for something that is missing often takes the shape of a circle: we go around and around tracing and re-tracing our steps. Those lost in a landscape inadvertently travel in a circular trajectory. What have we learned by the time we come around again?
The soundtrack suggests a windswept, desolate landscape. There’s the haunting call of the nightjar – a creature believed to be a guide to departed souls. Is there something more? A human voice carried on the wind? Is it the voice of the one who is lost? Or the one who is longing? What is the nature of the leavetaking at this Eleventh Hour?
While this body of work marks coming full circle in very personal aspects of her life, Vári wants to invite the audience to consider the power inherent in performing our journeys in a conscious way, to make living and creative connections as we go along. That which we may consider lost, may just be hiding, in a different guise, to be found when we are ready.
The Eleventh Hour video installation is accompanied by a series of monotypes, gathered in three unique ‘Variable Edition’ books, each comprising eleven pages of prints and loosely connected writings. Vári’s practice habitually considers the links between individual and collective identities and how these are shaped through certain traumas. Through her work Vári has written a history of herself in relation to this trajectory that attempts to recover what has been lost – but by doing so, instead precipitates the beginnings of a new cycle.
The Eleventh Hour
2017
Two-Channel video installation with Stereo audio
6′ 45″, looped
Review by Robyn Sassen:
https://robynsassenmyview.com/2017/07/26/ode-to-the-hole-in-your-heart/