The Running Dog

The works of concept and video artist Birthe Blauth question our perceptions and ideas of reality. In The Running Dog exhibition at the ‘apartment of art’, she presents some new works, developed in 2014-2015. 

Her video animation work Merry-Go-Round focuses on the construction of reality through words. The observer is circled by an endlessly revolving room with no door. The room, an office, is in an unusual state of order or disorder and contains a bizarre constellation of objects. The walls end at the top simply in grey and look as though they have been torn off. Could this be where reality suddenly ends? Or is it the grey that’s reality – the reality we ignore? As the video progresses, the names of some of the objects appear, drawing our attention to them and giving them some kind of order, highlighting them – possibly even making them real? With each turn of the room, however, the objects are named and categorised differently, and the more they are named, the less we perceive the room (i.e. reality?) itself. In the end the film shows only the names, leaving observers to add in the images themselves. Throughout the film a barrel organ plays in the background, repeating its melody over and over, sometimes playing slightly out of time, out of tune and, at times, even ridiculously wrongly. 

The installation Tea with Madeleine refers to the madeleine episode of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In this scene the taste of a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea catapults the narrator back into a long-forgotten chapter of his past. The present moment is never experienced in isolation; far more, everything we see, hear, smell and taste brings back fragments of the past which change the way we view and experience the present and our current reality. A single trigger brings to mind different relics of the past in different people. This sound installation presents a conversation over tea in which both speakers are presented with the same stimulus words. Each one to drifts off into a very different world as they follow the word. Their paths then cross again and the next stimulus word is presented, causing them to drift apart again. 

The images in the Moments series symbolise the way different layers of time fuse simultaneously and mutually with each other in our experience. They are reminiscent of those we see in dreams, images that feel real to us as we dream them but which we reject as unrealistic when we are awake because we are ignorant of the way the realities of different moments merge in our current experience.   

The Running Dog is an architectural ornament that brings together the themes of the three other pieces. A continuous piece spans the width of every wall of the room, it represents a rounded ‘wave’ motif, which was especially popular in Greek antiquity. It symbolises eternity, the repetition of the same thing at different points in time. Or even at the same time. Perhaps everything goes in rounds, unchanging, with only minor modifications that we do not notice. The piece is both labyrinth and eternity, the same, unapproachable reality, created by words, changing, concealed, constructed, structured. And without these words, it’s just a Running Dog.