The story, 2016 video, (05 min 41 s)
The work constitutes itself through duality. It is playing with the viewer’s look and thinking of the listener.
Video represents five people, sitting thoughtfully, obviously listening to something we cannot hear. Sudden body moves make relatively static recording dynamic and interesting. We watch their minimal movements, expressions, and reactions, evasive moments otherwise difficult to obtain. Spectator of the artwork gets to see the listeners without hearing the same stories. He asks himself: what is it that these people are listening to? Why do they respond differently from one another?
Five people are listening to five different stories taken from tabloid newspapers. Short articles are being read precisely and seriously; the combination of trivial contents and sophisticated reading of them seems absurd. The listeners do not know that they are being recorded. Their reactions to what they hear are therefore authentic; one could say that the video represents the truth, their character, the non-pretending, uncensored expressions of their thoughts. The moment we put the headphones on, the quietness is substituted with the same stories the people in the video are listening to. Work unveils the relation between the narration of the body language and narration of the stories played, between quietness, listening and attention.