Minnette
Vári
REM
A night-time installation by Minnette Vári
Night sounds of the Karoo: crickets, bats, occasional gusts of wind, an owl
calling. Onto an uneven stone or concrete structure, or the exterior of a building,
is projected a figure moving in dreamlike slow motion, as if weightless, treading
on air. It is the figure of a woman, a ritual huntress, a Venus of Willendorf
- changing her position and shape while all around her other creatures slowly
appear and then dissolve again into darkness. Other human figures become visible:
half-distorted, blurring away and re-appearing. These figures go through familiar
motions: walking, meeting, fighting, moving objects around. The image resembles
a Bushman rock painting: a tableau of human and animal figures and various objects
engaging in a flow of relationships: the hunter and the hunted, the shaman and
the devotees, adversaries in combat, the arrival of Europeans in their awkward
cattle-drawn wagons. Despite their hallucinatory appearance, some images also
seem strangely contemporary: scenes of modern warfare appear, present-day vehicles
move about, people engaging in familiar late twentieth century actions. On the
projection surface, all the different images appear as dream-objects in a landscape
of apprehensive expectation. Throughout, the central figure performs her slow,
rolling, trancelike dance, asleep and dreaming.
REM (rapid eye movement) is a physiological state during sleep most associated
with dreaming. The blood flow to the brain increases, breathing and heartbeats
become irregular, the hands and face start to twitch and voluntary muscle controls
are lost. REM Sleep is often called the 'Dream State'. This is the most active
state of the sleep process. REM dreams are vivid, filled with physical and emotional
energy. During this time the mind is at its most active as the subconscious
deals with all the information, memories, neuroses, fears and emotions archived
during wakefulness. Some scientists refer to REM as a third level of consciousness
that allows us to relive life experiences.
The figure is that of the artist, filmed while asleep. The phases where she
was the most restless were selected, edited together and made to play in slow
motion. All around her, images of historical and contemporary Southern Africa
unfold: taken from post cards, newspapers and books, historical, geographical
and political images of the last century: a hundred years of great change. The
work engages the hopes and fears of those who have lived through the turmoil
of an infamous history and now have to find the best possible future. It refers
to the Aboriginal Dream Time, a time suspended between yesterday and forever
- but projects this into a much anticipated
and imagined Tomorrow (the 21st Century).
REM can also be seen as a warning or omen communicated through a dream against
the hubris of nations turning away from history in myopic negation. Therefore
it is also a call for calm reflection and deliberation. REM questions our perception
of reality and whether our actions sometimes take their cue from a primordial
unconscious rather than from waking consciousness. On a bigger scale, the figure
represents that of the earth itself: a life in free fall, a fertile body full
of dormant and diverse potential, entering an uncertain age, spiraling into
an unknown destiny.
© Minnette Vári
Johannesburg 2001
Artist: Minnette Vári
Title: REM
Medium: Video Animation
Date: 2001
Dimensions: Variable
Duration: 7 minutes, 18 seconds. Looped indefinitely
Winter Solstice
l
On this longest night of the year,
I am thought's hermaphrodite,
half present, half dreamt.
In this unreal world, all windows dissolve.
Sleep flounders between two stars:
orphaned halves of a press-stud.
Not knowing myself distresses the shadows of leaves.
I have admitted to my faults,
and still I am astonished to find myself sad!
Obsessed with truth, my heart
wrestles to conquer its cage.
To the south, an accumulating storm
accepts itself in spasms.
Content with duality, wood-owls confer:
Who? You.
Who? You.ll
Discovered by cold, I am
restless beneath these layers of rational wool.
Rhomboids of insomniac light are frozen to the walls.
Out in the real world, the wind is all bluster and muscle:
my every half-awakening dream is torn
by the shriek of a loosened latch.
On this the longest night of the year,
the lumbar ache of loneliness is as integral to my being
as tinnitus is to hearing.
Eventually I rise, and pacify the latch.
In our mutual nudity, a streetlight laughs aloud.
Serene as a child in the traffic of her dreams,
the intuitive moon negotiates clouds.III
At Newgrange, four thousand years gone, shamans,
astrologers, shaggy warriors, slaves, wrestled
massive boulders into place, built a tunnel,
a chamber, laid out chiefs' ashes, and nestled
Beneath a mound their reverence, that acceptable dread.
Four thousand years on,
this one winter dawn,
the sun still spikes the dark, horizon to tomb,
and gilds again the ethereal scabbards of the dead.
And here, the same sun, this identical dawn, tips
over the trees, lances through an airbrick, lights
roofbeam after beam, without shame, like a blade.© Dan Wylie, Zimbabwean-born
writer and poet.This poem was written between 1990 and 1995 (exact date not
available), I came across it as the production for REM was nearing completion,
and found its tone and imagery evocative and serendipitously similar to my intentions
in REM.