project description

The video image shows the interior of an empty, open space: the borderline between inside and out is thin. Human presence can only be felt through the adjoining sounds: a male voice recalls horrendous TV-images, a popular disaster movie, a long-term imprisonment or hostage-taking. The radical rift between sound and image reveals a film which needs to be listened to and brings the described scenes uncomfortably close to the visitors. 'Proof of Life' is a sound movie with empty images which testify to their own, problematic redundancy.
 

archive.transmediale.de/site07/persons.html (transmediale website archive)

related text

The work 'Proof of Life' by Herman Asselberghs is testament to the power of art to bring its audience into the present. Its layering of meaning and the interplay between different times and spaces, mirrors current multiple realities saturated in images of terror,the viewe) is impotent and in a perpetual state of emergency. 'Proof of Live' is an artwork which first and foremost speaks to a universal and splintered human condition through both the description and metaphor of incarceration.
Consistent with a long history of text based interventions, Asselberghs plays with a space denoting an, 'absence of presence and presence of absence' with strong resonances, reminiscent of the film essay by Alain Resnais, 'Night and Fog'. Sitting between audio performance and site specific installation, this work demonstrates the power of the text. Contemporaneous in form and content, referencing and further propagating mediated witness and solace, ‘Proof of Live’ invites us into a space in order to question the degree of our own comfort and the abstraction of the world around us. (transmediale.07 jury statement, excerpt)

archive.transmediale.de/site07/nominees+M58d2e0404a5.html

related links

project site: www.augusteorts.be/projects/project/18

image credits

[01] Herman Asselberghs: Proof of Life