Gabriela Noujaim

Text by Raphael Fonseca-
Time machine
Reproduction, citation and appropriation – many could be the words to the poetic universe of Gabriela Noujaim. Another term, researched by the art historian Hal Foster, seems more adequate: recording. The act of the “technical reproducibility” appears in many of her artworks not only as a way to remind the traditions of art history and culture, but as a potency to create a new narrative from iconic images.

An anonymous camera captures the movement of the nature on the air. Which is the first goal of this record? Remembrances of a trip? A study of zoology? A private album of memories transformed into a public channel of videos in the World Wide Web? In “Sky and sea”, an aquarium becomes a landscape panorama. If photography was once called camera obscura, the basis of this video installation is a “transparent chamber”. The violent flight of birds echoes the mathematical perspicacity of Escher. The economic amount of water inside the container has the shape of a lake that reflects and distorts the action. This seems to be a crucial verb in the production of the artist: “to distort”, to use images and to provide future interpretations that are beyond literalness.

In “The serpent’s egg”, the cinema has its movement excluded and frames are projected through the exhibition space. The potency of the horizontality is perpetuated but these faces framed by Bergman receive a more phantasmatic layer than the original. The egg can be from the serpent but it’s a Moebius strip that comes in front of its enlargement. Besides being a geometrical figure, this image reminds about the coming of Max Bill to Brazil and his importance to the development of concrete art (and neoconcrete in the future). Less palpable than art history, the ancient mythology and the symbol of ouroboros: the eternal return, beginning and end connected.

Thinking with the artworks by Gabriela Noujaim, the image of the serpent that bites its own tail and the need to look back to produce the art of today. Past, present and future are problematized in an artistic research that has engraving, photography and video, in other words, the technical image, as a time machine.