• Chiara Pirito

Exhibition
January 14 - February 22, 2003

Other exhibits

Exposure is a reference both to exposure to prying eyes in a public space and to the amount of time film is exposed to light for realty to be burnt onto it.
Shots of people sitting in cars as they wait at traffic lights play on four monitors placed in a line. Chiara Pirito filmed these cars at the same traffic lights in Athens on twelve consecutive days from sunset until late at night. She selected and edited these images for a four-sequence video installation, freezing some images, which have become pieces in their own right.

Here we can see the same shot of a car window, same perspective, same lighting; but the faces and the subjects change. The same view is multiplied in a myriad of different situations, all reciprocally irreducible, exhibited like a cross section of a pattern that could stretch to infinity.
As with her earlier work, the artist elaborates the theme of the subjects' plurality and uniqueness. Exposure is a site of transfer, temporary pause and continuous movement, where the subject shares space with lots of others who are 'automatically' shunted forwards by the next one. The sound, composed by Enrico Ascoli, reveals an imaginary mechani sm; a metaphor for the invisible dynamics inherent in the incessant movement of the traffic and images.
The faces are not simple portraits: caught off-guard, they question the image as they shift their glance towards the camera filming them. This interrogation challenges the viewer, who in turn becomes involved in this looking game. In this way a dialectic relationship is set up, which oscillates imperceptibly between the person acting out the scene and the viewer. In Exposure, the characters themselves become part of the image and an imaginary public, as if the imaginary were simply made up of everything that is visible. Behind the transparent division of the car window - an ambiguous boundary delimiting public and private dimensions - the car's interior opens up to the outside, and the subjects react within its confined limits, somewhere between intimacy and exposure, isolation and revelation.