Total Eclipse of the Heart
Original title: Hjärtats totala solförmörkelse
Two-channel video installation and sound/mini-DV transferred to DVD and analog tape, 2004
Video 1: 4:20 min. loop, color, sound
Video 2: 8:53 min. loop, color, silent
Audio: 19 min sound loop on a reel-to-reel tape recorder
Total Eclipse of the Heart consists of three parts: one looped short film on a monitor, one video projection, and one recital on an old fashion Revox reel-to-reel tape recorder. The monitor shows silent black and white scenes: tunnels, reflections of light, the setting of a table... drafts of narrations that can take form. The projection shows a monumental circle-shaped red solid, which to a large part hides the black-and-white moving images behind it. From the tape recorder comes a male voice monotonously reading the text “117 of 146 Instamatic Images”, which meticulously describes a series of photographs that have been perforated with stiches. In Total Eclipse of the Heart, Selander investigates the nature of a hidden room in the image, its “hiddenness”. Imagine yourselves staring into your own blind spot. On the one hand, the red solid in the film meets the gaze of the beholder as an eye of its own and sends back the gaze, and on the other hand, a relation (an insecure exchange of meaning) is formed between the red solid and the two other parts of the installation: the smaller film and the voice that monotonously chants descriptions of perforated photographs. Selander explores the black or blind field, that which does not become image, and its relation (bleeding) to other stations in an installation, to other parts of an image.
Image 1: Installation view, Filmform, Stockholm, 2004.
Image 2–5: Still from film.
Image 6: Installation view, Galleri 300m3 Art Space, Gothenburg 2005.
