Exhibition Review

Contemporary theories of subjectivity tell us that identity is constructed and, therefore, unstable. How is it, then, that our sense of self and our place in the world can feel so fixed? The works of British-Spanish artist Isabel Rocamora suggest that we needn’t look far to understand: what binds us to our social selves is a complex web, spun with small details of clothing and objects and repeated bodily movements and gestures; even the land beneath our feet pulls us, like gravity, toward particular identities. In each of the four moving-image works shown in the Koffler Gallery’s Troubled Histories, Ecstatic Solitudes, Rocamora explores four demographics of identity, then deconstructs the props and processes that hold, and often hurt, them. Evident was the artist’s performance background, and her subsequent development in video, then film. Curator Mona Filip’s selection of works and their arrangement in the gallery allowed for subtle conversations to develop between them, although they’ve never before been shown together. Serving to introduce both the show itself and Rocamora’s first moving-image experiments was Portrait in Time and Gesture (2005). Throughout the six-minute video, two nearly identical women, shot independently and then fused together through double exposure, stand before a roughly textured wall. When the video begins, the figures are aligned, and appear as one. Then, throughout the remainder of the video, the women variously merge with and separate from each other. The gap within the self opens up, then closes, suggesting the roving identities within a Lacanian split subject. Screening this work on a small monitor in the gallery entrance served its curatorial purpose—marking it as one of the artist’s early transitional pieces—but the monitor’s small size limited its aesthetic potential, available in the graceful flow of movements and mottled colored background. Three high-definition videos, shot originally on 16mm film, occupied the two gallery rooms. In the first room, and directly across from each other, were two films that shared symmetries, despite their different subjects. The loose narrative in the twenty-one-minute dual-channel Horizon of Exile (2007) expressed—through performance, dance, and sound—women’s tightly proscribed existence in society. The film was inspired by post-9/11 media representations of Middle Eastern women. Under that Orientalizing gaze, these nameless victims of Islamic brutality served to justify Western invasion. Rocamora sought to return to them their flesh and feeling. Horizon of exile follows the figure of “woman”—represented primarily through actors’ performances—through an allegorical journey within and away from her constricted role in society. In the first scenes, a woman gets dressed in her domestic space—her identity closing in more tightly with each precise layer of clothing. The singular figure doubles to two women who, clothed in black robes and hijabs, move through arid desert landscapes. Their states of pain, ecstasy, and, finally, unveiled release at a verdant oasis are expressed through creative dance movement. Mingling at times with wailing Armenian choral music are short excerpts from Rocamora’s interviews with women who reflect upon their subordinate positions within male-dominated culture, making such statements as: “Our existence is wrong, being a woman is wrong . . .” Rocamora, attempting to broaden women’s difficult condition beyond the politically motivated images of Muslim women, included two brief close-ups of two South American women, but the gesture was too limited to be effective, instead rendering them merely as token. Most powerful in the show was the twenty-minute Body of War (2010). Its position directly across from Horizon made the two films’ symmetries easy to identify. The male figures depicted are real ex-soldiers—two Bosnian and two British, and a chorus of unidentified others—who perform, through ritualized movement and costume, the production of their particular version of masculine identity. Their military training is performed/reenacted on the historically potent site of Normandy—on the beaches, among the ominous remains of concrete Nazi bunkers, and on a gray runway expanse. In their standard green jumpers and black boots (the gear that shapes their fighting function), the men engage in hand-to-hand combat training—specifically, the Krav Maga technique, a series of fighting maneuvers developed and refined by the Israeli Defense Forces, and now used internationally. In an early scene, shot with a handheld camera and shown in real time, two soldiers perform