Sarah Beddington

Brief Encounter Video installation | dv | color | 2'46'' | United Kingdom / USA | 2007 © SARAH BEDDINGTON, 'Brief Encou `Brief Encounter` uses three simultaneous images to reflect on the fragility of current life in Lebanon. The central image was filmed in West Beirut. A couple is seen at a café table beyond a divide created by a dirty piece of plastic sheeting. The man is dressed in army uniform, the woman’s head is covered with a hijab. They face one another, talk and laugh, move ever closer and finally briefly hold hands. The left hand image shows a tethered hot air balloon slowly rising slowly until it can go no further, into a post-sunset sky beyond the Holiday Inn in Beirut. This high-rise building, close to the Mediterranean, still shows the scars of mortar fire from the civil war that ended in 1990. The right hand image shows a cedar tree, the motif of Lebanon that is present on the flag. In this shot the tree is a symbolically immature specimen, intermittently shrouded in a mist that undermines its materiality. Sarah Beddington is a British artist based in London and New York whose multi-disciplinary work examines the intersection between the personal, the political and the social to be found at the periphery. None of her film and video works are staged, they are non-narrative observations, verging on the documentary, recorded from an unmoving camera. The works are characterised by meticulous framing, sensuous imagery and suspense reminiscent of film noir - a sensibility informed by her practise as a painter. Under her detached gaze, cultural and visual fragments coalesce into poetic tableaux. With seemingly disconnected sequences, Beddington builds an eloquent insight into a world that appears to run parallel to our everyday understanding of it. Solo exhibitions include ‘Crossing’, DAC, New York (2008); `Places of Laughter and of Crying`, Bloomberg SPACE, London (2008); `Panoptiscope`, Petrie Museum, UCL, London (2006); `Parallel Lines and Other Stories`, Artlab, Berlin (2005). Group exhibitions include `Eastern Standards: Western Artists in China`, MASS MoCA (until March 2009); `Vanishing Point`, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; `About Time`, Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum, Denmark; `Panoramica`, The Rufino Tamayo Museum, Mexico City. Her work is represented in a number of public and private collections including Arts Council England. Artist statement A sense of place is always the starting point for all my works. Sometimes I have a feeling that something may happen in a place and I set up the camera and wait and sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. And perhaps what is already happening in the shot is enough for me but a split-second event may flash past which changes the emphasis completely. By recording long stretches of time in a single shot I think I am trying to incorporate something of the actuality of the place into the work - something sensed but invisible. When framing the image I want to nudge the viewer into an in-between space, a space you can risk getting lost in and making up your own narrative. What appears to be the subject may be incidental, just a marker in a larger context. Places of transition are interesting to me – in terms of their physical re-construction and also in terms of politics and economics. The three simultaneous moments shown in ‘Brief Encounter’ are a distillation of my experience in Lebanon and particularly in Beirut, a city that has dealt with a great deal of trauma and feels like a city on the edge - not just of the Mediterranean but split in so many ways. Each image of the video triptych deals in a slightly different manner with the idea of fragility. They are the three images of all the material I shot there that felt closest to my understanding and experience of the place. Sarah Beddington 2008