Melvin Moti
No Show, 2004
Artist
Melvin Moti
Title
No Show
Year of creation
2004
Technology and duration
16mm film on DVD, color and sound, 24 minutes
Year of acquisition
2009
Acquisition of the foundation
Melvin Moti primarily creates films and videos, accompanied by photographs, objects, prints and books. His works often revolve around obscure episodes or minor figures in the history of the last century. Both its film medium and its themes have a precarious status – close to being forgotten, if they aren't already. However, Moti does not activate them out of nostalgia, but rather as starting points to re-explore the boundaries of the imaginable and tangible, the distances between the fact and the unbelievable, and the gaps between clarity and the unconscious.
His video No Show (German: No Exhibition), originally shot on 16 mm film, and the artist book of the same name are also about imagination - as a productive counterweight to fictionalization and virtualization. Moti refers to the historical event of a museum tour of the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg: During the Second World War, the museum had outsourced its art collection for security reasons. In 1943, a museum guard led a group of soldiers through the empty halls, in which only the picture frames with no works remained on the walls, and described to them the paintings by Fra Angelico or Rembrandt van Rijn from memory.
In No Show, a male voice can be heard offscreen, addressing a group of visitors who cannot be seen in Russian and describing their works of art. All that can be seen is a single, very slow zoom through an empty room that gradually darkens in the twilight. With the help of sound tracks and imagination, more than an entire exhibition in the Hermitage during the years of the Second World War could probably be created before the eyes of viewers. A consciously maintained dichotomy in the best sense can develop in Moti's work between localizable images and withdrawn certainties - space for other images and their effectiveness, which ultimately depends on something that takes place outside of themselves.
-ak
