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Ana Torfs’ recent work includes a 35mm feature film, photographs, a video and a slide installation, and two books. The latter are tied in with the film Zyklus von Kleinigkeiten and the installation Du Mentir-Faux, but they also function as autonomous works. Her latest project, Elective Affinities/The Truth of Masks & Tables of Affinities, is a complex installation, consisting of a series of slides and photographs and a comprehensive publication.
Although Torfs’ work is not associated with any specific medium, viewing it put me in mind of a specific pictorial genre, namely the portrait. In many cases, all that you get to see is a human face, or people sitting at a table or posing in a small group. Not only is the genre lovingly practised, it is also systematically problematized.
The installation Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1993) records a performance, directed by Torfs, of Claudio Monteverdi’s madrigal of the same name. A ‘video triptych’ allows the heads of the three performers to be shown individually, the singer of the recitative face on in the middle, and the crusader Tancred and the infidel maiden Clorinda as pendants in profile on either side. When they are silent, they look ahead, seemingly unmoved and indifferent, and even when they sing, the ‘blankness’ of their faces – after all, singers ‘perform’ the drama with their voices, not through facial expressions – contrasts strangely with the emotions evoked by their music, the savage action being narrated and the passion of the characters they represent. How much, and more importantly, how little can be read in a face...
Ana Torfs took her cue for Zyklus von Kleinigkeiten (1998), a film about Beethoven’s final years, from one of the few direct sources we have about that period of his life – the little notes written by his friends and acquaintances to communicate with the by now deaf composer. The film was largely made with non-professional actors. The images are in black and white and the actors don’t speak. They were even told, it would seem, to avoid acting at all cost. From time to time, we see a thin smile, a tip of the head or an understanding glance, but that’s as far as it goes. Fragments from the written conversations are read out by off-screen voices. As you watch, you scrutinise the faces in search of more: interpretation, narrative or emotion. Yet the characters – which are so carefully sketched out for us in a conventional movie – pass before us without our being able to get hold of them, silently stringing together a series of trivia to create a chain of everyday concerns of the most prosaic kind.
The loneliness, desperation and wariness of the deaf man are transmitted on to the viewer. We sense great tension with the young nephew who lives with him, but never find out the details. Beethoven himself never appears. After all, he could talk and so does not feature in the exchanged notes. Beethoven exists entirely through the others, in a few of his witticisms and in the marvellous fragments of music that accompany the nature shots between the scenes. The one does not fit into the other, nor is any image formed. It is an impossible portrait.
And so, in a sense, is Du Mentir-Faux (1998–2000). Slides are projected in a darkened space: an extended series of black-and-white portraits of the same young woman. Her face conveys suffering. From time to time, the series is interspersed with texts containing questions. Something in the young woman’s pose, style and hairdo sparks a feeling that is confirmed when we glance in the accompanying book: we’re looking at a portrait of Joan of Arc – a theme to which Ana Torfs had already devoted a short video in 1988. Torfs’ autobiographical text and her selection of fragments from the trial reports testify to her fascination with this historical/mythical figure, but equally to the impossibility of finding out the truth about her. The inquisitors’ questions are so wickedly biased that they no longer even deserve a response, while our contemporary questions have to go unanswered. The longer you look at the portraits, the more that, there too, the model and her tragic story appear to dissolve into a kind of void. In this pared-down setting, the extreme simplicity of the pose eventually returns the viewer to something we had momentarily forgotten: someone has asked a model, a young actress, to pretend...
One of the works in the photographic cycle Narrations, which Ana Torfs began in 2000 and is continuing to work on, shows us the model once again – or rather, she eludes us for a second time. The oval portrait initially appears black, but when examined closely, we can just make out the face of a young woman dressed in the Victorian style. In Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Oval Portrait (1850), a painter obsessed with producing the most ‘life-like’ portrait possible has his young wife pose for him in a darkened room in a tower for so long that she ends up dying. Ana Torfs has turned that fatal story around for us: it is not the model who has to fade away in the dark (infinite posing was not required – after all, a photograph is made in an instant), but her image that dissolves into the darkness.
In her most recent work, the installation Elective Affinities/The Truth of Masks & Tables of Affinities (2000–2002), Ana Torfs continues her systematic exploration of the issues raised by the portrait. And once again, the relationship between text and image, or between reading and visualising, is a principal theme. The loose unfolded sheets of a ‘book-in-the-making’ are spread out on reading tables, creating a kind of illustrated reading journal in which the artist links fragments from a variety of literary, biographical, autobiographical and historical works in an entirely free and associative way. A large-format slide projection shows us a double series of portraits – the same man and woman, seen frontally against a white background, but dressed differently each time. The different clothes, hairstyles and accessories not only modify the sense of time and the social context that we, the viewer, read into them, but also alter their psychology. This seemingly never-ending masquerade of two models who never show their ‘true faces’ can, if we are so inclined, be linked with the texts, though they can equally be read as a playful interrogation of ideas like ‘truth’ and ‘identity’. These questions take on an entirely different weight in the light of the often radical ‘resistance’ that certain individuals wage against intolerance, alienation and violence – a key theme in the fragments of text that Torfs has selected.
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