Straitjacket

Czech artist Vladimír Turner studied film and intermedia, and has carried his practice through residencies and projects in Buenos Aires, Rotterdam, Brisbane and beyond. He has built a long body of work—including films, videos, public-space interventions, performances and objects—that he understands as a single practice of “active civic life”, oscillating between documentary, public-space art and activism. His attention is drawn to the contradictions of today’s society: consumption, marketing, the extraction of resources, the devastation of landscapes, and the impossible promise of fully ordering the body of a great city. Turner’s three-minute video loop is a distillation of these concerns. The piece shows slow-motion footage of a solitary figure, wearing a costume entirely assembled from standard objects of urban “safety” infrastructure, moving through an open natural landscape. The straitjacket of urban materials and the unconfined body of nature inhabit the same image in a sustained chromatic contrast. A multichannel soundtrack of distorted natural and urban sounds draws the visitor into a slightly mind-altered, displaced time.