A.K Dolven
Wilkinson
20 Jan – 14 Mar 2010
London
E2

one take on 16mm film. A young girl spins continually in a cold, white and icy landscape. She swirls without stopping while the camera moves slowly from her pale green trainers to the crown of her head…..The camera movement, steady and repetitive, and the girl’s relentless spinning, together reveal only fragmentary intimate moments within an unstable visual world where the body is at once vulnerable and resolute.(AK Dolven)

Body and environment are set against and then within each other. The spinning female’s skin at times mirrors that of the snow white-blue surroundings reflecting the colour and texture back to us, as she drifts in and out of frame and in and out of the landscape. There is a frenzied element to the spinning, not so that it would unnerve the viewer but more that the spinning girl is pushing herself closer and closer to becoming indistinguishable from the landscape, to become one with it. Upside down or right way up, its not clear when the shift occurs and so the beautiful illusion continues. She draws us in-we are not separated from her and the landscape as she drifts towards the camera and then away again. She beckons us to join her on a personal journey of surrender to, then acceptance of, her landscape.

Something about the sparseness, concrete and whites, of the gallery, the hint of chill in the air only re enforced the experience of the landscape and body connected.

There are three pieces in this exhibit and I have concentrated on, ‘when the sky became my ground’ not to ignore the other two, not at all, but the instant and long lasting effect that this instillation offered me means that I have to spend more time on it.

Ahead-2008

The work is a three-part installation consisting of a large-scale HD video projection and a separate video on a monitor placed elsewhere in the room….Shot in a single take and without edits, the scene shows a snow hillside in the Arctic, in evening light. A group of young people appear in the bottom of the screen, carrying another young woman backwards towards the top of the frame…The prints and tracks they leave behind record the peculiarity of their task. The second part of the work is an examination of the detail of the first scene.(AK Dolven)

Self portrait-1989-2009 was made over twenty years as the Artist revisits a performance piece. Ahead-2008 is a fascinating tale of futility and human versus landscape brilliantly displayed for the audience on an over sized tilted screen, the audience have a sense of the scale of the snow and incline.
Past works.

For more from AK Dolven go HERE
There is still time to see this and I cant recommend it enough.
For the simple and inviting joy of the spinning girl in white-blue snow.