• ArtistMelvin Moti
  • TitleNo Show
  • Year of Origin2004
  • GenreVideo
  • Technique and Duration16mm Film auf DVD, Farbe und Sound, 24 Minuten
  • Erwerbungsjahr2009
  • Erwerbung der StiftungYes

Melvin Moti mainly creates films and videos, alongside photographs, objects, prints and books. His works often revolve around obscure episodes or minor figures from the history of the last century. Both his medium of film and his subjects have a precarious status – close to being forgotten, if they are not already. However, Moti does not activate them out of nostalgia but instead as starting points for re-exploring the limits of the imaginable and the ascertainable, the distances between the actual and the unbelievable, and the gaps between clarity and the unconscious

His video No Show, originally shot on 16 mm film, and the artist book of the same name, are also about imagination – as a productive counterweight to fictionalisation and virtualisation. In them, Moti refers to the historical event of a museum tour of the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. During World War II, the museum had stored its art collection elsewhere to protect it. In 1943, a museum attendant led a group of soldiers through the empty halls, with only the picture frames without any works hanging on the walls, and described to them from memory the paintings by artists including Fra Angelico and Rembrandt van Rijn

In No Show, a male voice can be heard off-camera speaking in Russian to a group of unseen visitors, describing works of art to them. All that can be seen onscreen is a single, very slow zoom through an empty space that gradually darkens in the twilight. With the help of the soundtrack and the power of imagination, possibly even more than an entire exhibition in the Hermitage during World War II emerges before the eyes of the viewer. A deliberate discrepancy in the best sense of the word can develop in Moti’s work between locatable images and revoked certainties – space for other images and their efficacy, which ultimately depends on something taking place outside of themselves.

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