KANTUTA QUIROS & ALIOCHA IMHOff - Overlapping Biennial

”The End of All Resistance” (2010)
video, 29’
courtesy of the artist
A palimpsest of coercion and gazes, Chelsea Knight’s video constructs a claustrophobic
maze of language deeply embedded within a violence reminiscent of Harold Pinter. As
dialogue crosses scenes, overlapping narratives collapse into one another, revolving and
short circuiting one another, at times coming together in a makeshift Greek Choir reciting
in unison. The rhetorical techniques are derived from the US Army Field Manual 22-2-3,
released in 2006, which introduced a new set of standards for “cruel and unusual punishment”,
including sleep deprivation and various stress positions. The artist’s interest,
however, lies “in the more benign designations of the manual and in particular its section
on emotional approaches,” which advocates the creation of affective bonds which the
interrogator can manipulate in order to extract the targeted information. The most direct
representation of this emotional approach is in the face-off between US army interrogators,
both recently returned from serving in Iraq. Their role playing experience in the field
can be traced in their performance, which at the same time is inflected with the distance
and alienation of Brechtian epic theatre. Knight juxtaposes this classical paradigm of power
with a domestic setting, conscripting her own parents as “actors” in familial disputes
rife with latent tensions and unbridled affection, a snapshot of an ongoing “performance”
born of intimacy. This framing of relationships starts to reveal the dynamics of power in
everyday language and familiar deceptions that at first glance may seem trivial.
Knight’s latest work is a continuation of her ongoing investigation of incarceration and its
affect on the captive bodies. Employing the conventions of theater, conflated with quotidian
scenes stripped to their essence, her form emerges as a rapier repartee, words parsed
into weapons. As Chekhov noted, “If you introduce a gun in act one, it will go off in act
three.” With Knight, there is no certainty but the one that the gun is always loaded and
ready to be fired.
Jason Waite
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