Queensland Art Gallery - Queensland Government

Runa Islam
Things that are restless and things that are still
When Runa Islam returned after 23 years to Dhaka, the place of her
birth, she felt herself a tourist and began developing ideas for film
vignettes that would work against the grain of immediate impressions
of the city. On Bangladesh’s official first day of spring, she paid
rickshaw drivers to sit in a city park, still for once rather than in motion,
their faces visible and reflective rather than bent over with physical
effort. Her camera sweeps across the dusty park, recording children
squatting in a circle beneath the trees and the wind gusting leaves
in silence. The slow reveal ends as it foregrounds an assembly of
men sitting on rickshaws, harnessing the cinematographic means of
mainstream entertainment to focus attention on an overlooked subject.
catch a fly, eye bright and beak ajar, and, on the other, a wire cage;
the whole is attached to a wheel and handle. 7 When the panel spins,
the two images combine and the bird is caged. The thaumatrope
is framed in a room lined with cases displaying scientific objects —
scales, calipers, a pendulum — and framed also by Islam’s geometrical
camera movements, rising vertically, then panning left to right, before
ascending on the diagonal across the bird and fly. On a new camera
angle, through the spinning bird and cage, a man’s hand can be seen
working the toy’s mechanism. In a final shot, the thaumatrope comes to
a halt side-on to the camera. Like a film frame line, it is almost invisible,
an interstice — what is not registered, though it frames the image.
Islam describes her aim as ‘a non-dramatic performance/event that
would interfere with the usual daily routine of the workers and hence
illustrate what could be akin to a wish-fulfillment’. 1 Where action staged
for the documentary camera generally seeks repetition, Islam creates
a situation unlike the constant movement of a working day. Slowly
observing faces, she offers no interpretation, but underlines both the
individual humanity and hermetic inaccessibility of her subjects. Her
lens turns up into the trees, like a quiet mind observing the movement
of the leaves. The silence makes the viewer aware of the act of viewing
and recalls the constructed film experience.
At the end of First Day of Spring 2005, the introduction of sound
reinstates time and movement: traffic noises, birds gathering, a vendor
crossing the park with a tower of pink bags, and a woman looking long
at the camera as she walks by. The final shot, from ground level, finds
the backs of the rickshaw drivers riding away from the park and its
vanished still point. The frame goes black but the sounds continue.
Islam’s works perpetually recall the construction of film and art. In
First Day of Spring, a camera glides across the subjects, posed by the
artist through a contractual agreement to be still. The viewer observes
the unmoving rickshaw wallahs and the perfectly controlled camera.
Film theorist Raymond Bellour suggests that relative stillness in films,
especially the filming of photographs, allows the viewer to reflect on
cinema. The unconscious viewer is transformed into what Bellour calls
‘the pensive spectator’, uncoupled from the image through ‘effects
of suspension, freezing, reflexivity, effects which enable the spectator
to reflect on what he/she is seeing’. 8 Runa Islam is fundamentally
interested in this process of uncoupling, and in underlining the
material qualities of film. She demonstrates that film is an apparatus
that frames, withholds and reveals — like a museum, or a thaumatrope
which plays on the hidden mechanisms of sight.
Kathryn Weir
The Restless Subject 2008 also deploys a series of devices to literally
bring viewers to their senses: the rhythmic whirr and clack of film
passing through the gate of the 16mm projector, the small size of
the projected image, and the sculptural nature of the projection
space designed by Slovenian artist Tobias Putrih. Islam and Putrih
first collaborated in 2007, 2 when Islam sought another artist to create
film-viewing environments that would provide alternatives to the ‘black
cube’. 3 Putrih compares these structures, made from materials including
cardboard, ply and even film stock, to a ‘digestion tract’, 4 describing
them as ‘display mechanisms, but without an ideological context’. 5
While the installation elements make the viewer conscious of seeing,
hearing and moving through the space, the film that they frame points
to the mechanics of vision. It features a thaumatrope, an optical toy
of the early nineteenth century, whose name can be translated as
‘turning wonder’. 6 In its simplest form, it consists of a disc with images
on either face, which spins on a string to create the effect of the two
images combining. The thaumatrope in The Restless Subject consists
of a panel with, on one side, a delicate painting of a bird poised to
Endnotes
1 Runa Islam artist statement, in Subcontinent: The Indian Subcontinent in
Contemporary Art [exhibition catalogue], Electa and Fondazione Sandretto
Re Rebaudengo, Milan, 2006, p.88.
2 For the ‘Lost Cinema Lost’ exhibition at Galleria Civica, Modena,
27 January – 30 March 2008.
3 Interview with Milovan Ferronato, ART iT, vol.5, no.3, summer–fall 2007, p.53.
4 Lost Cinema Lost [exhibition catalogue], Galleria Civica, Modena, 2008, p.69.
5 Lost Cinema Lost, p.70.
6 The thaumatrope was first popularised around 1825 in London. See Jonathan
Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1992 [1990], p.105.
7 The thaumatrope which appears in The Restless Subject 2008 is held in the
collection of the Museo del Gabinetto di Fisica dell’Universita degli Studi di Urbino
‘Carlo Bo’.
8 Raymond Bellour ‘The pensive spectator’, Wide Angle, vol.9 (1), 1987, p.10. See
also Laura Mulvey, ‘The pensive spectator’, in Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second:
Stillness and the Moving Image, Reaktion Books, London, 2006, pp.181–96.
Runa Islam
Bangladesh/United Kingdom b.1970
The Restless Subject (still) 2008
16mm film and CD wild tracks, colour, sound,
6:42 minutes / Image courtesy: The artist and
White Cube, London / Photograph: Todd-White
Art Photography
First Day of Spring (still) 2005
16mm film, colour, sound, 7:00 minutes / Image
courtesy: The artist and White Cube, London /
Photograph: Todd-White Art Photography
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