Giardini

Giardini, a visually sumptuous film of 30 minutes, is composed of two projections set side-by-side, which steadily gather a series of evocative vignettes. As the title suggests, the film is set in the famous exhibitions grounds in Venice – as T.J. Demos writes in his essay in Giardini Notebook the location of the ageing national pavilions. These otherwise well known monuments are shown here in an unexpected light, during the interim between biennales, in the down-time and during the nights, in the shadows of spectacle. Demos continues, Like McQueens past films such as Carib s Leap/ Western Deep , 2002 and Gravesend , 2007, Giardini denies clear links between representation and significance, between form and content – not to exclude reference but instead to allow the image potential meanings to crystallise, its facets reflecting numerous paths of fabulation. Indeed, the film s suspension of its images in a field of multiple possibilities defines its power: to release life from belonging to any certain code, clear narrative, or restrictive regiment…. . Giardini constructs a fictional world and does so with great care… In [it] beauty arises in the imagination of life beyond and outside the conventional orders of art and politics… The revelation in Giardini concerns… the experience of a film that generates the space of contingency so powerfully in its experiential register, wherein the possibility of survival outside of conventional orders may transform from the virtual dimension of the image into realisation elsewhere.