Works in the exhibition

Portret, 1992, Video object

A small monitor hanging in a glass display case on the wall displays the artist’s profile. A tube extends from his mouth and ends just above the eye, constantly dripping liquid into it. In terms of its emblematical appearance, the picture suggests a paradoxical “closed circuit”.

Retorica, 1992, Video installation

In “Retorica” Peter Bogers stages the process of learning language from a different perspective. Two monitors are suspended at different heights facing each other, thus creating the impression of a dialogue between them. The lower monitor alternately shows the eye and the mouth of a man, while the upper monitor shows the same fragments of a baby’s face. In a perfectly synchronised, endless game, the child utters a sound and then observes the adult mimicking its babbling. In this reverse hierarchy of the language-learning process, the child explores the linguistic relationship in which the relationship between denotation and recognition is shifted.

Fingers, 1993, Video sculpture

In “Fingers” two small control monitors are mounted at the ends of a hoof-shaped case, a kind of magnet lying in a display case. The video shows fingertips arranged in a circle against a black background, moving synchronously and in symmetrical formations. The cutting of the video images creates the impression that the movement of the fingertips obeys the logic of magnetic resistances.

Sacrifice, 1994, Video object and photograph

“Sacrifice” consists of a b/w photograph and a glass base containing a control monitor. The top panel of the base features a lens above the monitor. The video shows a close-up of a mouth that, accompanied by a gurgling sound, again and again fills up with water, that then seeps away in the mouth cavity. The photo shows the studio setting in which the video was produced. We see the artist lying in a bath surrounded by recording equipment (camera, microphones) and a mechanical apparatus that allows him to control the recording procedure. In this self-experiment, control and helplessness coincide as does the relationship between the viewer and the person being viewed, artist and model, subject and object.

Heaven,1995, Video installation
Courtesy: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

“Heaven” is a room installation consisting of seventeen monitors. The videos show incidental events recorded in a private interior: a spoon being stirred in a coffee-cup, a curtain blowing, a temple pulsating, or the movement of a second hand. We only see one second of each of these actions, that plays forwards and backwards again and again. Only in one video does the outside world penetrate the otherwise intimate atmosphere: with the same rhythm as the other videos it displays television pictures of a collapsing interior during the Kobe earthquake.

Ritual 1, 1997, Video installation

“Ritual 1” is a concentrate of images and sounds from fictitious scenes of violence taken from TV series. The installation consists of twelve monitors arranged in a circle on the floor, each monitor facing the centre. The film stills of successive scenes of violence gradually move from left to right over each screen. Only when the picture is completely visible on a monitor, does the scene run for exactly one second – clockwise from monitor to monitor, with exactly one second delay. The outbreaks of violence – comically exaggerated in this reduced form – thus travel (us) in a circle.

Play-Rev.-Play, 1999, Video installation

“Play-Rev.-Play” consists of three synchronised monumental video projections. They show a head, a hand and a foot, floating as if weightlessly under water. At regular intervals, the isolated body fragments float up to the surface, accompanied by distorted breathing. However, a hand that suddenly appears on screen pushes them back under water every time. Precisely this brief moment is stretched in its temporal and spatial structure. The isolated body parts, that only appear to be acting autonomously, are subjected to a choreography that does not obey the motions of a whole body, but rather the image machine controlled from the outside.

Shared Moments, 2001, Video installation

“Shared Moments” is based on an extensive collection of recordings that study banal social behaviour patterns: people sitting in street cafés, railway station scenes, paragliders, a young man being washed, a sleeping child. The individual motifs were recorded for several days, weeks or months. The place and time of these film recordings are indicated in the caption – to one twenty-fifth of a second. The installation consists of three projections, each divided into up to four screens. That is, three, six or twelve variations of each motif study are displayed parallel at one time. When viewed together, the assembled material creates the impression of a simultaneity of time, space and action that in fact does not exist. The individual scenes always come to a head at the same “moment”: the moment when the individuals being observed – simultaneously – look into the camera. They form the gaps, as it were, in Boger’s rigid system, that captures the intimate moments of independently experienced “realities” in spaceless and timeless “tableaux vivants”.

Brain Field, 2006, Video installation

This video installation is based on an abstract painting in black paint that the artist created in an action ranging between scientific experiment, action painting and video performance. With even, symmetrically rotating movements of his right and left hand, he set out to synchronise both halves of his brain and thus motor control of his hands. Two cameras mounted on the artist’s forearms, recorded the process. The recordings were post-edited.

Chorus, 2006, Sound installation

A lectern is surrounded by a large number of microphones, an image that evokes associations with an important press conference or speech. In contrast to what microphones are supposed to do,¬ transferring voices that speak into them,¬ the microphones in “Chorus” produce voices themselves. Each microphone contains its own voice. Contradiction and harmony are alternating. An elusive rhythm, related with breath, bounds all voices together.