Reading a description of Yto Barrada’s A Life Full of Holes – The Strait Project, which features Barrada’s photographs of her native Tangiers, suggests it might fit into Witte de With’s recent run of earnestly politicized exhibitions that have sometimes taken on the character of postgraduate anthropology projects; redressing far-flung injustices is a noble calling, but no guarantee of producing compelling material. Yet Barrada largely transcends the merely worthy through her stylistic breadth and inventiveness. Throughout a series whose scope almost recalls The Beatles’ White Album, in which every song sounds different than the one before, we witness Barrada’s hand at nature photography, photojournalism, painterly landscapes, satellite imagery, close-ups of archival documents, black & white domestic portraiture that nods to Cartier-Bresson, Kubrick-esque overhead shots of factory workers peeling shrimp at infinitely long tables, even coffeetable-friendly spreads of fading tilework chipped by the sun. But these photos’ plentiful visual charms never undermine their ability to speak forcefully to the charged issues just beneath the surface. Barrada’s virtuosity is a tool that piques interest in her subjects’ plaintive backstories. In Autocar, for example, we see colorful blobs of unknown, possibly computer-generated origin; closer inspection reveals them to be the fenders of touring buses that frequently harbor young stowaways, who are said to use the bus companies’ iconic logos as codes when planning their escapes. Indeed, if any theme unites these pictures, it is the potential journey never taken, hints of escape that remain tentative: a boy with a toy boat that doesn’t sail, people waiting at an airport lounge or rainy bus stop, chain-link fences with tiny holes cut out, anonymous faces staring out of windows, children touching an illuminated advertisement for a cruise ship, a ferris wheel spinning aimlessly, dead-end ravines. And everywhere, images of the Strait itself, with Spain visible on the horizon but ultimately inaccessible. Worlds away from the exotic playground fetishized by Burroughs or Bowles, Barrada’s Tangiers is a bottlenecked city whose current political reality dictates that travel across the Strait of Gibraltar has effectively become the privilege of inbound visitors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Guido Van der Werve
Montevideo, Amsterdam

Humor and art are two great tastes that rarely taste great together, but in the polished hands of young Dutch artist Guido Van der Werve they combine forces to challenge our received notions of beauty. His Chopin-soundtracked triptych Nummer drie, for example, in which a moonlit ballerina fails to flinch as a tree falls perilously close behind her, could easily lapse into terminal cuteness, the province of a local film festival’s slighter works whose winsome ambitions you passingly applaud but seldom remember. Yet Van der Werve’s mix of high production values and macabre undertones catapult his works from throwaway one-liners into more nuanced examinations of irony and solitude. The gravity of Suicide 8945 till 8948’s bullet-to-the-head loop is tempered by its schlock gore, and getting hit by a car in Nummer twee absurdly occasions a team of tightly choreographed Degas piling out of a police van. These deeply personal videos recall the confessional, performative style of Vito Acconci or Bas Jan Ader, but the surrealistic dreamscapes Van der Werve conjures draw more from film than from the conventional gallery event. The cinematic reference points here are many: in Nummer Drie we see echoes of Wenders’ Der Himmel über Belin, as the camera pans down from a cramped room overflowing with Dangerous Liaisons ballroom divas to a generic Chinese restaurant, whose patrons (including Van der Werve) seem at once frozen in time and lost in private thought. Acknowledging the beauty of a well-filmed auto accident coyly nods to Cronenberg, but perhaps even closer to the mark is Sweden’s bittersweet Roy Andersson, who’s been funding his celebrated oeuvre over the decades by directing commercials on the side. Indeed, many of the works here would sit well on a showreel of Clio Awards favorites, were they not shot through with Van der Werve’s disarming melancholy.
DOUGLAS HEINGARTNER