Empire (after Andy Warhol)

Empire (after Andy Warhol) is a single channel video that explores the constructs of ideas on place, non-place and placelessness. The work reframes an ordinary building in reference to the representation of an iconicized structure, while shifting from the global to the local. Borrowing its title from Andy Warhol's film 'Empire', which consists of a single shot of the Empire State Building and runs 8 hours and 6 minutes and chronicles the passage from day to night, my single channel video rather echoes the 'space of current relations', associated with notions of temporal and spatial continuity in which the concepts of domestic comfort are unsettled through an unrelenting gaze. The footage captures in a static shot the transition from day to night surrounding a residential apartment block, thus reframing the extant strangeness of a minaret rising through the roof of the apartment. The flats in the block, built a quarter of a century ago in Karabük (Turkey), remain occupied and the main part of the mosque with the prayer room for worshipping is situated in the basement of the apartment. Illuminating light abruptly goes dark, generating a different register through a moment of interruption where we witness something different, 'another truth'. In several of my works an edifice becomes theatrical and embodied in mobility in a metaphoric sense. Not as a décor, but as an actor on a theatrical stage. Although static, the changes taking place in the surrounding landscape/exterior act as the ultimate performative and transient elements within the image. I believe that an image presented in an art context should have a degree of poetry embedded within it. I also like seeing these images as informing other images of truth. Exhibited at Threshold Artspace, Perth, Scotland, 31 January - 3 March 2009. Exhibited at Art in the Auditorium III, Fundacion Proa, Buenos Aires, Argentina, January 2011