WHITE CUBE.

RUNA ISLAM

Director's Cut (Fool for Love), the main work in this show (all works 2001), was a color film transferred to video and projected on two screens. It was accompanied by Staged, an installation of black-and-white photographs taken from the film, and a neon text piece, Prop. The film shows excerpts from a rehearsal of Sam Shepard's play Fool for Love. It sets up a comparison between the languages of cinema and theater, a bit like Robert Altman did with Shepard's text in the well-known film acted by the playwright and Kim Basinger. Islam, however, is interested not in the narrative development of the play, but in its linguistic construction. She shows us a series of flashes where she recreates the working environment of a stage during rehearsals. Panoramic views of the empty theater alternate with close-ups of the director seated in the orchestra section as he directs the actors--that is, creates fictitious subjectivities. Some sequences show the action on stage, interrupted and repeated; others show the comments exchanged between the actors, their efforts to remember their lines and settle into their characters. The projection of the various sequences on two contiguous screens energizes the scene, imbuing it with a state of anxiety that, in the end, permeates the entire operation. Splitting the images, the artist treats them as comments on each other.

Islam is interested in the relationship between acting and truth and in the expression of subjectivity through simulation; she creates situations of subtle psychological ambiguity. Concurrent with this solo exhibition, she showed another video in London, installed in a hotel room as part of a group exhibition curated by the artist Simon Tegala. That work, Room Service, 2001, was striking in its psychological intensity as well. Viewers witnessed two maids stealing into the very room in which the work was being shown and, in a curious sequence reminiscent of Genet, taking the place of the regular guests and consuming the meal meant for them. Director's Cut, in contrast, seems to be a reflection on the relationship between sentiments and their linguistic expression. Shepard's play deals with a conflict of passions, and the video plainly shows the difficulty of expressing this through language--whether in the form of words or of body language. Shepard's words recited by the actors, the director's words addressed to them, their gestures and comments, the succession of images, all serve in the final analysis to make us understand how language is a complex operation that seeks to govern an incandescent subject, namely passion, without ever succeeding in fully expressing it. Two particular moments in this extraordinary work seemed most memorable: the figures of the two protagonists who call out to each other and then embrace before leaving each other in silence, seen from afar and thus completely out of focus; and the alternating foregrounds of her and him, with their respective voices exchanged, so that while we see her lips repeating "I love you," we hear him exclaim "I hate you," and vice versa.