No fixed address
As if opening a time capsule – both a container for preserving treasures and a historical record waiting to be discovered at some future time – TV Moore’s works reveal a poignant and magical tension. Combining excerpts from documentary films with references to the experimental cinema, music, video theatre and performance, the Australian artist brings a suspended and hypnotic atmosphere to seemingly normal situations. By concentrating and intensifying such marginal moments, and despite the immediate simplicity of the familiar images he employs, Moore portrays eerie events which offer a multiplicity of interpretations.
Tv Moore’s first solo show in Berlin “No Fixed Address” is a profound and multi-layered investigation of a melancholic wanderer evoking the notions of transience and of being an outsider. The idea of not having a home as having lost it or for being unable to return home in unforeseen circumstances, a vagabond though perhaps a common individual. We are let to drift through a sombre and almost monochromatic installation. Upon entering the space we also enter a landscape of the mind, which deals with the identities of people and places and how man has either chosen or been forced into dynamic modes of living, either due to natural or man-made disasters.
In his large video projection titled “The Forgotten Man” Moore focuses in on material from the late 1960′ about vagrants and bohemians inhabiting Sydney’s central red-light disctrict of Kings Cross. Built as a documentary, but with the artist revoicing the original voices of all the characters, the work talks about misfits and transience which highlights the difficult attitude of feeling rooted in a place, The Forgotten Man simply gives life to the perspective of these characters, dealing contemporaneously with a light and elegant touch to ponder on history and gentrification, poverty and capitalism from many different perspectives.
Again in Moore’s work “Taps”, the title a reference to haunting bugle call, we foresee an imminent sense of loss or failure. A woman sings the melancholy hymn of Taps, “an ode to something gone, perhaps”, as the artist describes it. We bear witness in close up on her face, and her eyes are covered as if she is wearing a mask. We are not privy to the details or the context of this senario and as time dilates endlessly and gives us the feeling that something indeed has gone wrong! which is amplified by the fact that Taps is usually played at a soldier’s burial.
On another level the photograph Rebuild or Leave shows a delapidated and abandoned detached house. Ruins and isolation – whilst oftentime caused by the power of natural forces beyond our will – befall on what is supposed to be a secure foundation. Having lost its original function, the image of the house then becomes a mirror for the condition of disruption on the idea of the home, of having no fixed place. Here again is a suspended feeling of estrangement of place and time, TV Moore has himself not had a fixed house for 3 years.