Helen Anna Flanagan

Metronom: Blurring Contour (2021) is a synesthetic narration of clubbing in which the immersion in the atmosphere mediated by the video camera is total. What is your Digital Deviation, theme of this edition of the Digital Video Wall project?

Helen Anna Flanagan: Blurring Contour comes from an earlier video work titled Friday that was set in a nightclub in Southend-on-Sea in the UK. The empty nightclub served as a stage for two actresses to playfully explore language. The script involved using the rules of specific games as an alternative strategy to structure, but also as a way to create new scenarios for improvisation. The video involves a lot of dialogue and a number of scenes, although this particular looped sequence is reduced to focus on the physicality of the nightclub. Surfaces are rendered sticky and incomprehensible, the varicose veins and the warped cellulite of a woman’s crossing leg is extenuated through the perspective of a champagne glass smudged with lipstick, and hazy smoke machines are highlighted by alternating dancing purple lights. Blurring Contour focuses on these surfaces and alternative perspectives, seeing the space of a nightclub as an intoxicating space — a space of the night where language and bodies seek out new encounters and moments of contact. The idea of ‘Digital Deviation’ here is about returning to the body, to tactility and to affect — to zoom in and out on different surfaces in order to occupy and emphasise the different positions mediated by both the body and the camera. The title plays with the illusory effect of popular cosmetic products that are used to contour and define an area of the body through deceptive means.

M: Blurring Contour is the first video work included in the second edition of Digital Video Wall project. It is a short looped clip that involves alternating hallucinogenic surfaces and perspectives to explore different sensorial perceptions of the body using the apparatus of the camera. How do you conceive video recording and what is the role of the camera in your research?

HAF: The camera is the perfect apparatus for me to focus and elaborate on various experiences in the world. Instead of a more traditional documentary approach, my recent work is rooted in fiction and involves scripting, casting, storyboarding, location scouting, prop-making and planning. As such, the work is constructed, sometimes even artificial. This evident construction is employed to make a viewer more aware or critical of what they see. Characters often embody different positions to reflect on different socio-political topics, either directly or indirectly. I would say my work involves an unapologetic amount of influences. I tend to combine many different ingredients, not unlike a soup where you combine the leftovers from the previous day, or try to be creative with what’s left in the fridge. There’s no waste in my kitchen! For me this abundance is more in keeping with a layered and lived reality.

M: Your artistic research often consists of observing small fortuitous events in everyday life and merging them in fictional narratives that take the form of installations, performances and video. What is the role of absurdity in your investigations of modern social structures?

HAF: Yes, I have taken cues from the long tradition of absurdism to thwart reason and convention, ranging from ideas within The Theatre of the Absurd – Beckett, Pinter, Ionesco to absurdist television of the ’70-’90’s. It can be a useful strategy to dismantle conventions, express subversive thoughts and highlight contemporary experience and events within the world.

M: Your work Gestures of Collapse (2019) has been awarded with the VISIO Young Talent Acquisition Prize and uses the television news format to reflect on how contagion, rumors and beliefs spread. What is that interests you most about how human behaviors change in a public environment?

HAF: I have been interested in the mimetic unconscious and how behaviors can easily spread within social groups. Mimicry can be found in some of my earlier works as a way to interrogate the social and to examine the ways that individuals perform in different contexts. Something very revelatory from a young age was an awareness of this mirroring, a vivid response when watching, reading and registering another face becoming emotional. I would find myself following through with the same physical response in an impulsive act of emotional camaraderie. I started to think more about these emotional contagions and the power of connection or influence, be that from mirror neurons triggered earlier on in life as a means to copy, learn and reciprocate, through to ideas around embodiment, empathy, connection, collectivity and conformism. In Gestures of Collapse, I focused on the abstract forces of mimesis and its impact on the physical body through a psychosomatic disorder known as Mass Sociogenic Illness. MSI gives the appearance of physical symptoms without there being any identifiable cause and can be passed from one person to another. It’s really interesting to observe how behaviours can spread in social situations and the physical impact this has on bodies, especially in relation to autonomy and agency.
The mimetic unconscious of crowd behaviour can be traced in the rise of racism and Nazism in the twentieth century where totalitarian leaders relied on hypnotic forms of will to power to control the masses. The contagious effects of such mimetic behavior is often accelerated by media. Gestures of Collapse is based on a case of MSI in a Belgium school that spread further to other schools via a regional news report. I was curious how dissemination has an effect on the physical bodies of others, questioning an individual’s capacity to act and how it is limited, enhanced or manipulated by socio-cultural contexts and conditions.

M: Your artistic production ranges from videos, installations and performances. How do you relate with different ways to present your work? Is there a medium you enjoy most, or it depends on the circumstances and on the various works?

HAF: Yes, it depends on the project and where it is presented. Most of the time it’s combined. My work almost always involves performance, be that either recorded or in a live scenario. Performance is part of the video, the video can then be integrated into an installation or environment, and an installation can become a platform for performative action, and so on. I think i’m not so interested in fixed ideas about how things should and shouldn’t be, but enjoy moving transversely — to experiment with the cross-overs and possibilities of materials, disciplines, bounds and means.

M: Your education includes a MA at AKV St Joost, Netherlands and a BA from Falmouth College of Arts, UK. How have these institutions and your path inside them informed your practice? Are there any professional experiences that left a particular mark on you and your art?

HAF: My background is in documentary photography and this has certainly influenced my artistic approach in terms of framing the world around me. The earlier works I made were analogue photography projects and small self-published zines and books. I would make portraits with strangers, go places I shouldn’t and observe almost everything. The act of photographing really heightened my senses to what was readily available and often overlooked. I’d find some rubbish on the floor and I would just sort of circle it for a while, then get on my knees and realise when angled in a certain way, quite miraculously, that a piece of debris can become the silhouette of a small bird mid-flight. When I would walk through Birmingham and photograph, it always felt like I’d found something rather revelatory or significant in what was actually really, really banal. There’s a huge amount of projection, desire and scrutiny in the gaze. It pushed me to actively look. Even constructing a series or sequence of photographs was completely informative and probably the earliest gateway into moving-image. Many photography courses are quite cross-disciplinary these days so it’s a landscape that is constantly shifting.

M: What is your relationship with social media? Do you feel any change in the fruition of digital art in comparison to a pre-covid era, also outside the milieu of video art festivals?

HAF: Sure, there are plenty of online resources which are really great, but for me it has become quite overwhelming. I either become restless or fatigued. Perhaps it’s because I am positioned in an overly familiar space with my laptop, or maybe it’s about the dosage? If anything, it’s made me realise more my own desire to be located in different physical environments. I guess it’s my own personal fascination with public sites, how bodies and things negotiate space or come into contact, and how this ‘being-in-the-world’ so to say, stimulates the senses. Perhaps that’s why a lot of people these days are trying to get a walk in a day, growing exotic plants, scouting for a new pet companion, or other means to reconnect with something outside of themselves. It’s this idea of perspective again. When I’m looking at the laptop or mobile screen, my eyes are constantly focused on a certain point or distance. Perception is too positioned. When you enter into the world outside you start to realise all the positions in relation to other things — of physical depth, layering and multitudes. You can alleviate your eyes and look to the horizon or down at your shoe, at the cat chasing a flickering something on a gust of wind, to turn suddenly at the sharp ‘ding-a-ling’ of a bell and an impassioned “get the hell out of the way you f****ing idiot!” It’s a wild world out there. The senses are invigorated.
But who knows, maybe the digital world is not so far behind…

Helen Anna Flanagan (1988, Birmingham) graduated with a MA from AKV St Joost, Netherlands and her BA from Falmouth College of Arts, UK. She has exhibited wildly and shown in a number of festivals. Upcoming exhibitions include: Gesticulating… Wildly, IKOB, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgium; Regenerate, WIELS, Brussels; Hypermarket, Kunsthal Gent; Public Park Etcetera, SMAK, Gent; Conjunctions, Sonsbeek Quadrennial with HISK, Arnhem; Emergency Biennial 2020, Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth, UK; Days of Our Lives, Susan Bites & The Balcony, The Hague. Helen is the winner of the 2019 IKOB Feminist Art Prize and the 2020 VISIO Young Talent Acquisition Prize. She was part of the post-academic residency at HISK in 2019 and 2020.

09/04/2021

Helen Anna Flanagan

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