Ann Sofi Sidén

On 8th July, the Galician Centre for Contemporary Art (CGAC) will present 3MPH (Horse to Rocket), work of the Swedish artist Ani-Sofi Sidén. The CGAC acquired the video installation at the last edition of the International Contemporary Art Fair (ARCO), and it will be on view to the public until 2nd October. The work is made up of 5 films which, together, create a panoramic vision of the artist’s journey on horseback. Complementing the project are 15 of the many photographs taken during the course of the journey, which will be exhibited in an adjacent room along with other works in the CGAC’s collection. Ann-Sofi Sidén already participated in the exhibition Ocho relatos nórdicos, held in the CGAC from 11th July to 15th September 2002, with the work Station 10 and Back Again (2001).

Ann-Sofi Sidén

Anni-Sofi Sidén (born Stockholm, 1962) lives and works in both New York and her native city. Interested in film, video and performance art, Sidén analyses in her video installations the mechanisms of power, and highlights the violation of privacy through issues such as control networks, surveillance cameras and madness.

In 1999 she presented at the 49th Biennale of Venice the work Who Told the Chambermaid?, an installation which recreates a hotel room controlled by security cameras, the images of which are shown on 16 screens in such a way that the viewer is made to feel like a voyeur. Through her analysis of the ways in which society enforces systems of control, she coerces the viewer into carrying out an act of violation of privacy.

Ann-Sofi Sidén uses her video camera to study people’s behaviour and investigate the limits between individuality and society, questioning the concepts of vulnerability and self-control, as well as issues such as exoticism and social exclusion, both of which are inextricably enmeshed in the history of Western civilisation.

3MPH (Horse to Rocket)

On 7th July 2002, Sidén set off on a journey on horseback from downtown San Antonio that would last 25 days. Mounted on a 15-year-old Appaloosa, she travelled east at a speed of 3 mph, covering a distance of 274 miles, before reaching her destination, the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, in Houston, Texas.

The idea of the work arose from a simple question: what would it be like to travel on horseback – a now obsolete form of transport – in the context of our highly sophisticated and speed-obsessed world, and undertake a ‘pilgrimage’ to an institution which pursues travel beyond the outer confines of the earth’s atmosphere. This juxtaposition is the basis of the artist’s investigation into time and speed. Imagine how a driver would react if he saw from his car window a horse and its rider advancing slowly along the highway, with the landscape in the distance.

Shot in panorama format, the thirty-five-minute-long 3MPH (Horse to Rocket) traces the visible and invisible ties that underpin the different social and cultural layers of modern-day Texas. The constant movement of the camera conveys a sense of movement.

Consisting of five films, it documents a journey on horseback between two American cities against a setting of vast expanses of flatland and changing scenery. The camera takes the viewer through suburbs, fields, small farming communities, derelict roads, urban shopping centres; past car dealers and bible readers, before finally reaching the precinct of the NASA, where rider and horse briefly pass by an immense and empty carcass of a rocket standing on a stretch of green grass. By using a highly condensed mix of moving images, still images and local sounds, the viewer is brought into a reality that is immediate and fleeting.

We see rider and horse for the first time at a crossroads, waiting to get past the traffic. The journey continues to the sound of hoofbeats against the noise of the cars buzzing past on the highway, through an Afro-American neighbourhood on the outskirts of San Antonio, in which children and onlookers go about their daily business.

Through this journey, Sidén analyses the variety of social and cultural aspects in modern-day Texas, shooting close up its infrastructure and people; and while the images are mundane they are rich in detail. Siden's imagery is immersed in a certain familiar idea of Texas (a conservative, even puritanical state populated by farmers and cowboys), but it goes beyond clichés and commonplaces by combining rural and urbanized settings in equal measure. In this succession of moving images and still photographs, edited down from more than forty hours of recorded material, the Swedish artist shows a landscape full of contrasts and paradoxes. The Texas painted here speaks English and Spanish, is white and black and also mestizo. It is a territory where both men and women work. Especially striking to the foreign viewer are the signs and icons on the billboards and posters so common in North America. Some sell products or services, others send greetings to astronauts. There is no lack of religious slogans either, especially those of the Baptist church. Nor is it any coincidence that in a country where the Indian population is all but invisible the artist has chosen to ride a fifteen-year-old Appaloosa, a breed of horse used by the Nez Perce Indians since the 18th century. The artist seems to ridicule the machoism associated with cowboy culture. Reaching the sanctuary of the advances in space technology embodied by NASA, the final images barely linger on the empty case of a rocket displayed before the public like a relic, a symbol of national pride.

The woman undertaking this journey is the artist herself. Although there is a sheen of credibility and realism in the way she depicts the journey (we see her drinking, scratching her back, talking to children and adults, giving the horse water), her idiom is nonetheless fragmentary and partial. It does not try to be comprehensive, or trace a genuine or objective portrait.

Pressetext

Ann Sofi Sidén. 3MPH (Horse to Rocket)
DVD, 35’
Koordination: Monique Lambie