KreisLauf (Circulation)
6-channel video installation, 1999, 9 min., loop.
(...). The video “KreisLauf” (Circulation) is projected externally onto a semi-transparent, cylindrical screen, which is suspended from the ceiling at approximately eye-level. Thus, the images can be seen both inside and outside of the screen’s corpus. One after the other, fifty people appear on the screen and take up positions forming a complete circle. During this, they seem to make eye-contact with the observer. When an observer stands inside the circle, he or she becomes the focus of their voyeuristic interest. If the observer’s position is outside the circle, it is the space surrounding the cylinder that the film protagonists fix with their eyes. In this video work, too, Aurelia Mihai opens a window on a space; however, it is not two-dimensional as in “PlattForm“, but a three-dimensional walk-on stage. Analogous to their physical performances, the observers are assigned different positions in space – inside or outside, centre or periphery. Finally, the video images of the circle of on-lookers begin to rotate faster and faster until they dissolve into a flickering band of colour, thus breaking up the constructed relations of view and space. (...)
One reading of the video installations “Platform”, “Circulation”, “Private Rooms” and “Endless Motion” is as experimental designs that utilise those illusionistic spatial relationships, which only film can produce, to probe our view of reality and, at the same time, deconstruct it. “Circulation” goes a step further: the filmic and the real space overlap at the interface, which is the observer, or rather the observer’s body – a body, furthermore, that is in motion. (...)
