An online exhibition available during the above dates. Visit our Current Screening page for the latest artist.
Mimeisthai is a multi-channel screen-dance installation adapted here for single channel viewing. This work responds to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘mimetic faculty’, which is, the ability to perceive and/or reproduce similarity.
This generic skill is possessed by all living things and finds expression on various levels, from the biological to the behavioural; such as in reproduction or camouflage, to the myriad ways that creatures communicate. In humans the mimetic faculty is said to be especially complex, enabling pre-verbal perceptions that lead to the construction of meaning and language.
In Mimeisthai gestural movements are shared, copied and repeated between performers both on and off-screen, and are amplified across multiple screens. This work calls upon the mimetic faculty of the performers to reproduce spontaneous
movement that is copied from dancers outside the frame. It also calls upon the viewer’s ability to perceive a choreography of repetition, similarity and difference.
Through duplication, repetition, and layering multiple exposures – a reference to early cinematic experiments by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey – this work also explores the mimetic faculty of digital video.