Passageiro [Passenger], by Dora Longo Bahia, also presents images of trips taken by the artist through various parts of the planet. In this case, however, the exhibition’s narrative is constructed by video together with the photographic image.
In South Africa, in 2005, Longo Bahia made the video Silver Session, which presents nebulous images of a boat trip along the channels of a river in that country. In the video Desterro [Exile], created in 2007 along the streets of the district of Santa Tereza (in Rio de Janeiro), the artist points her camera skyward, capturing the jumble of electric wires and light poles, creating a tangle of encounters and separations. Captured by a camera fixed to the roof of a car, the video gains velocity until disappearing completely. The video Passasjer, from 2013, was shot in a single take during a trip by train between the cities of Stavanger and Kragerö, in Norway. In this work, the static image of the passengers, reflected on the train’s window panes, blends with the landscape in constant movement.
In each of the three works, the soundtrack features sounds appropriated and re-contextualized for the video shot by Longo Bahia as a sort of travel diary, thus transforming the landscape and adding subjectivity to these grandiose vistas.
For their part, the photos of the series Sem Título (Patagônia) [Untitled (Patagonia)] were captured in a car trip taken by the artist to Patagonia, in 2007. The series is composed of views of mountains, glaciers, beaches and forests, deserts and rivers. These images, destitute of human presence, were created using pinhole cameras or Holga cameras, the Chinese brand famous for its inexpensive cameras with a plastic lens and body. The result is images of majestic landscapes which, due to the technical device chosen by the artist to record them, are either distorted, in the case of those made with the Holga cameras, or else marked by large reddish patches of light that entered the pinhole cameras. This procedure of corrupting the image appears in other works by the artists, as in the series Escalpo [Scalp] or in her series of paintings Farsa [Farce], in which Longo Bahia vandalizes her own canvases, pouring red paint on them.
Passageiro [Passenger], by Dora Longo Bahia, also presents images of trips taken by the artist through various parts of the planet. In this case, however, the exhibition’s narrative is constructed by video together with the photographic image.
In South Africa, in 2005, Longo Bahia made the video Silver Session, which presents nebulous images of a boat trip along the channels of a river in that country. In the video Desterro [Exile], created in 2007 along the streets of the district of Santa Tereza (in Rio de Janeiro), the artist points her camera skyward, capturing the jumble of electric wires and light poles, creating a tangle of encounters and separations. Captured by a camera fixed to the roof of a car, the video gains velocity until disappearing completely. The video Passasjer, from 2013, was shot in a single take during a trip by train between the cities of Stavanger and Kragerö, in Norway. In this work, the static image of the passengers, reflected on the train’s window panes, blends with the landscape in constant movement.
In each of the three works, the soundtrack features sounds appropriated and re-contextualized for the video shot by Longo Bahia as a sort of travel diary, thus transforming the landscape and adding subjectivity to these grandiose vistas.
For their part, the photos of the series Sem Título (Patagônia) [Untitled (Patagonia)] were captured in a car trip taken by the artist to Patagonia, in 2007. The series is composed of views of mountains, glaciers, beaches and forests, deserts and rivers. These images, destitute of human presence, were created using pinhole cameras or Holga cameras, the Chinese brand famous for its inexpensive cameras with a plastic lens and body. The result is images of majestic landscapes which, due to the technical device chosen by the artist to record them, are either distorted, in the case of those made with the Holga cameras, or else marked by large reddish patches of light that entered the pinhole cameras. This procedure of corrupting the image appears in other works by the artists, as in the series Escalpo [Scalp] or in her series of paintings Farsa [Farce], in which Longo Bahia vandalizes her own canvases, pouring red paint on them.
