A man, perhaps a mystic, his face concealed behind a golden starburst, stands before us, gold necklaces about his chalk-whitened neck; people in white robes stand holding staves as though guarding something sacrosanct; the same duo reappears, now a trio with a man sitting cross-legged on the floor waving a palm frond slowly to and fro; behind them the pure white wall and alcove suggest some temple-like space.

Elsewhere, on other screens in the darkened room at Modern Art Oxford, a classically robed woman raises her arms to the firmament on a scrubby mountainside; somewhere else, now wearing white and orange robes, she tends a macaw, we presume a sacred bird, in a sanctum of sorts; then, two women who may be Japanese, in white and orange costume, amble up a bleached barren hillside; then, the filmic collage continuing, a man with a camel appears, disappears, returns with two, while on another screen wrestlers grapple in balletic choreographed moves over rocky ground. Soon, someplace, anyplace, we see a daytime moon, a sparkling sea, a palm, a pyramidal mountain … We don’t know what is going on. And we won’t know even if we watch the entire four-hour screening of Chapters, a new film from young Cypriot artist Haris Epaminonda. All we can do is take in and process the imagery and construct our own narrative from the dreamlike sequence that Epaminonda offers in her “moving painting”.

“It was an exercise for me, something with no clear narrative that can develop through a series of images,” says Epaminonda. “I liked the idea of a film having no fixed point that you enter, and the idea of never-ending relationships between screens.”

Divided between four screens, hour-long films running in parallel show a constantly altering succession of meticulously staged scenes. They have no order and no set narrative, yet, somehow as the viewer’s eyes flit between screens, the actors, animals, natural and architectural settings and the actions of the performers combine and recombine in the mind as narrative elements such as love, longing, ritual, or separation. “The way I construct the film is not through a script. I create situations and start composing, and things come together to suggest an atmosphere, that suggest something is happening. The colours and forms also help suggest relationships.” Epaminonda draws from a spectrum of cultural influences, citing archaeology, anthropology and ethnography as interests, and the frescoes of Renaissance artist Fra Angelico, ancient poems, Japanese Kabuki theatre, and the films of Georgian director Sergei Parajanov as influences for Chapters. Born in Nicosia in 1980, trained in London at the Royal College of Art and Chelsea College of Art & Design, the Berlin-based artist swiftly made her name on the international stage. She has represented Cyprus at the 52nd Venice Biennale, and shown at Tate Modern, London, and MOMA, New York, among others. Chapters, filmed last year at remote sites in Cyprus, is co-produced by Modern Art Oxford, Kunsthaus Zürich, Point Centre for Contemporary Art in Nicosia, and the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice.

Moving from darkness into light, in a second gallery, visitors encounter a white-walled meditative space and some carefully sited sculptures. There is no direct relationship between the sculptures and film. She said: “I know the film is a very loaded experience, and I wanted a more calm space, not-directed, so the energy of the space is reduced.”

 

Modern Art Oxford
Until September 8