ART CITIES:Amsterdam-Jesper Just

Jesper Just is known for exploring ambiguous subjects such as gender, desire, relations and identity in his cinematographic works that link images to sound and music, is also known for his stunning spatial installations made from film. He often uses extreme dimensions to create presentations on various screens, and complements these with complex sound and light installations as well as the existing architecture.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: EYE Filmmuseum Archive

Enigmas disrupt Jesper Just’s narrative, creating a poetry-liberating tension. The artist leaves spectators with their own doubts and emotions. For his solo exhibition at EYE Jesper Just designed an installation that engages with the architecture of the museum building, with its sloping walls, skewed angles and facade grid. He also uses components from the previous exhibition. For each film installation Jesper Just assembles a large production team that includes trained actors and a professional crew for camera, lighting and sound. He employs a cinematographic language commonly associated with lavish motion picture productions for the cinema: sophisticated use of lighting; remarkable changes in perspective and mise en scène in majestic tableaux vivants; precisely framed images and flowing camera movements. In the exhibition Jesper Just presents three installations: “Intercourses”, “This Nameless Spectacle” and “Servitudes”. This is also the first time that Just has used a LED screen in a museum presentation to create a fragmented image. In “Intercourses” examines themes of architectural pastiche and cultural dislocation by creating an immersive, multi-faceted environment. Made up of five channels, the film is set in a replica of Paris, France, in a suburb of Hangzhou, China. Unlike many replica cities, this one is fully functional, though in contrasting states of construction and decay. The film follows three men, interwoven within the scenes, but it is the city that is the main character. Just explains, “I’ve worked in the past with the idea of architecture performing, with a building or structure as a main performer, a main protagonist. And here there was the possibility of working with a whole city. I was thinking about ways to make the city the protagonist or mediator between these characters, making them connect via the architecture. I wanted to explore how you could take something as superficial as this architecture and then turn it into something connecting humans”. In the two channel video installation with two opposed screens “This Nameless Spectacle” follow the peregrinations of an attractive, middle-aged woman rolling herself along in a wheelchair in Paris. First she progresses through the Buttes Chaumont park, passing by forests, cliffs and a waterfall. Then she is on a deserted street where a young man follows her from a distance, staring with enigmatic, possibly menacing intensity. Reaching the safety of her apartment, she gets out of her chair and putters about in high heels and a tightfitting dress. She pauses to look out her living room window, where she is transfixed by a beam of sunlight glinting off a high window in a building far away. We see then that the young man who was following her is pivoting the window on its hinge, directing the light into her eyes. Suddenly she falls to the floor in what seems at first to be an epileptic seizure but then begins to seem like sexual or religious ecstasy. Eventually coming to rest, she rises and walks out of the camera frame. The young man, wild-eyed and distraught, bangs on his window, evidently desperate for reconnection. The centerpiece of the installation “Servitudes” is a nine-clip film set in and around the equally iconic and controversial One World Trade Center that Just says is emblematic of the political and the spiritual. The film explores the body’s relationship to public and private space and the limits and boundaries of the body itself in a search for selfhood, following the movements of two young female characters through the realm of urban space. The first character is a child, her fingers exhibiting a physical disability; the other, a young woman, embodies the idealization/fetishization of youth and femininity that have come together as a hybrid of the model citizen and the “able-bodied.” In one film the disabled child is mirrored in the windows at the foot of the One World Trade Center, playfully looking at her movements as she taps a small rock against the facade of the building creating a rhythmic sound. In another a young girl sits alone in an office eating corn. Her hands are secured by Continuous Passive Motion (CPM) devices which both aid and hinder her ability to eat. As a symbolic nod to the disparity between identity and commodity, the individual and social constructs, the woman in the film’s interaction with the audience waivers between flirtation and apathy. The music in the installation serves as structural elements and vessels for connection, linking the characters, films, and the experience for the viewers like an invisible web, as the artist says “The music is used within the films to establish distance and within the physical exhibition space it serves to establish connection between the visitors and the films. The music also serves as a narrative where there may otherwise be no explicit plot or transparent course of action”.

Info: Curators: Jaap Guldemond and Marente Bloemheuvel, EYE Filmmuseum, IJpromenade 1, Amsterdam, Duration” 17/12/17-11/3/18, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-19:00, www.eyefilm.nl