Black Sand Beach
2011
hD color film with sound
In Adrien MISSIKA's recent film "Black Sand Beach" (2011), a dead tree stands upright on a Hawaiian shore, supported by a tangle of roots some two metres tall. The base of the tree's trunk appears to hover just above the blue line of the horizon, as though the Pacific archipelago were retreating towards the Earth's core, leaving the plant's hidden parts exposed. To the lulling melody of Hui OHANA's slack-key guitar classic "Sweet Lei Mokihana" (1973), we see a pair of dogs trotting across the black sands, where they are soon joined by a couple of ageing guys who resemble Lawrence WEINER and Jeff BRIDGES, were they to wave their respective goodbyes to the art world and Hollywood stardom and spend their remaining days as surf bums. The Jeff BRIDGES guy pats the caramel Labrador, the Lawrence WEINER guy swings gently from the tree's upper roots, and then they wander out of frame, followed by the dogs. "Black Sand Beach" is, by any measure, a film in which very little happens, but its air of honeyed melancholy is oddly affecting. On the shore, in their board shorts and beards, the two men seem to patiently await the end of the world. (Tom MORTON)
Darvaza
2011
single channel color HD video with sound
In Turkmenistan in 1971, Soviet geologists accidentally exposed a cavern of natural gas when a mining platform collapsed. Loathe to release the toxic emissions to the atmosphere, they set it aflame; and there it has burned ever since, nicknamed by locals 'the door to hell'. MISSIKA's film explores this infernal portal through a series of long, slow takes, each around a minute in length, in reverse progression from a close-up of sulphurous clouds to a final shot of the barren surroundings – the pit a thick, red scar on a dead world. For MENEGOI, these images recalled the apocalyptic sublime of early-19th-century painter John MARTIN (recently celebrated with an exhibition at Tate Britain). Inverting the usual trend of MISSIKA's work (for example his 2009 photomontage series, "Tueur du Monde", also exhibited, which are mock-ups that seem to show construction workers aboard a space station, a flying saucer taking off over a forest, etc.), the film presents something so Biblical in its horror that we assume it must somehow be a fake, a miniature, a mock-up or some other special effect, but in fact it is terrifyingly real: an everyday, man-made Armageddon. (Robert BARRY)
Dome
2011
super 8 film with sound transferred to DVD
The Super-8 film "Dome" (2011) is perhaps MISSIKA's most ambitious work to date. Here, an anonymous young man explores a vast domed structure built by Oscar NIEMEYER on the site of the Tripoli International Fair in Lebanon. Its construction was halted in 1975 at the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, and it has stood incomplete and inaccessible to the public ever since. As the camera follows the man through the building's shadowy interior, we see him slapping at the steel tendrils that hang from its concrete walls and beams as though they were piano keys or guitar strings. His actions slowly transform NIEMEYER's cupola into a gigantic musical instrument, filling it with an echoing composition of rattles, clunks and clangs. In the film's final frames, we see him clamber up the dome's exterior, like an astronaut about to plant a flag on an unblemished Martian peak, or the last inhabitant of a blasted Earth attempting to hail a passing starship. Is this a beginning, or an end? In MISSIKA's work, both possibilities walk hand in hand. (Tom MORTON)
Grand Prix
2009
single channel color video, no sound, dv transferred to dvd
While linking the Romantic landscape, the modern ruin and the eschatological sci-fi sublime is not unique to MISSIKA's practice, his work has a dreamy way with temporality that is all its own. His video "Grand Prix" (2009) comprises a succession of still frames of the late-1920s Spanish racing track, Sitges-Terramar, that goes by so rapidly we might imagine ourselves at the wheel of a sports car. This once-hallowed ground, however, has been abandoned, and bushels of weeds now grow through the track, like vines snaking up the steps of an Aztec pyramid. As with most of MISSIKA's works, "Grand Prix" presents us with a world absent of humans. Making our virtual passage along Sitges-Terramar's chicanes, we begin to wonder how soon the ecosystem will reclaim the concrete circuit, reducing it to dust. Not long, in the grand scheme of things, but far longer than any human lifespan. Ruins will always be with us, as we speed along our course.
HMI
2006
single channel color video with sound, DV transferred to DVD
The video installation "HMI" reverses the questioning of our relationship with cinema and photography. Adrien MISSIKA films a wall, lit by a movie spot. The film is re-screened on a wall. The lamp ignites with a violent sound and becomes increasingly luminous until it floods the entire room. This game confuses the relationship between the exposed object and the spectator by lighting up the one supposed to be out of the light. The image also refers to science fiction, suggests a sun rise, or evokes the big bang. The video provokes a very ambiguous sensation that is in strong contrast to the banality of the display. In reference to minimal art, the artist evokes the very primal physical dimension of the spectator.
Monument versatile
2009
single channel video
In his interest in architecture and landscape, MISSIKA conveys, as he says, « a relative definition of the ‘monument,' which can be gigantic or small, natural or constructed, forgotten or famous, archetypal or banal ». He « makes monuments out of various things, which may or may not be monuments, from the garden folly in "Fabriques", to the fountain on Lake Geneva in "Monument versatile". » What bestows coherence on his work is above all « the question of viewpoint » —that of the camera, of the viewer, of subject and object. He varies « scales, distances and angles of approach. » Whether he is subverting the apparatus used for showing, as in his early works, or making films that mix documentary and fiction, MISSIKA sets out to reshape the way we see, to transport us towards an unknown elsewhere. (Amélie EVRARD)
Regarde les mouches voler
2012
single channel b&w silent SD video
The video "Regarde Les Mouches Voler" opens up completely different temporal levels, asynchronism and shifts in perception. In this work, a fly is recorded crossing the field of view with the help of a high-speed imaging technique borrowed from the scientific world. In exaggerated slow motion and constant anticipation, we trace a movement that normally can't be perceived by the human eye. Each individual wing beat seems almost cumbersome and monumental. The perceived film time is diametrically opposed to the actual flight time. In the spirit of the French expression "Regarde Les Mouches Voler" (en. “to stare into space”; literally “to watch flies”), stasis and motion collide and create a timeless zone in the realm of idleness and boredom.
Sailing Stones
2011
hD color film with sound
Sailing Stones is a video about a moving image that you cannot see move, moving stones that you cannot see move. Filmed on location at Racetrack Playa, California, within the boundaries of Death Valley National Park, Racetrack is perfectly flat dry lake surrounded by domineering dolomite cliffs. On the floor of the ancient cracked white clay bed rest several pebble to boulder-sized rocks which appear to have broken off the cliffs on the south end. Each rock seems to have traveled along the bed, leaving behind a mysterious path. According to NASA description, « some rocks travel in pairs, their two tracks so perfectly in synch along straight stretches and around curves that they seem to be made by a car. Others go freewheeling, wandering back and forth alone and sometimes traveling the length of several football fields. In many cases, the trails lead right to resting rocks, but in others, the joyriders have vanished ». Adrien MISSIKA's portrayal of this geological site focuses on a particular temporality, a longue durée, a slowness that is given by the changing land, one that we can never witness in our lifetime. Captured with several lengthy fixed shots, initially one has the impression of being faced with photographs transferred to video, given their dominant sense of stasis. In this work, MISSIKA takes painting as the horizon for the images construction (by way of the eminently Friedrichian subject of the great expanse, the fixed picture plane, still composition and reduced internal action) but uses film to add to its perception, which is one where the viewer regains a particular awareness of time and (indirect) motion. If photography condenses time, capturing the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the instantaneous, film can be defined as a succession of moments or instants that replace one another. In film, each shot can potentially replace the other or each shot can accrue, as with Sailing Stones and its distention of time experienced. Here, each cut from one shot to the next is abrupt, but rather than disappear in montage, the video remains sutured, bringing the now of the disruption, which is the time-space of the viewer, into the realm of the work.
Tephra horizon
2013
hDV video, color, sound
In the video Tephra horizon, the diversity of views, alternating between aerial, handheld camera panoramic, stills, like the multiplicity of frames, high or low angle shot, close-up or wide shot, are all ways to translate a subjective and panoptic vision, a physiological relationship with the “Piton de la Fournaise”. Here, Adrien Missika sublimates, in an elliptical succession of contemplative plans, the attraction and the paradoxical beauty of a landscape, lunar and barren, apparently calm and always menacing that, in a reversible process, evokes at the same time the origin and the Apocalypse, fate and ruin.
