A Dual of Giants 2003

Video, DVD

Article on Sundland's video; A dual of giants, written by Thomas Kvam 2003

The video travels through a film-historic terrain, by referring to Sadako’s hidden face, in Hideo Nakatas Ring-trilogy, the girl in the Poltergeist movies, and how the daughter’s death at the beginning of Nicoloas Roeg’s Don’t look now, with her ghostlike presence, ends with catastrophic consequences. As these references indicate, Kjersti Sundland is making use of conventions and references from the horror genre, but those are first of all used in order to show us the horror in the repetition of genre stereotypes.

If we take a closer look at the horror genre, boys are often portrayed as inverts of the male character in the mainstream-cinema and its heroic pose. This becomes clear in the Omen-series; here the boy is the son of Lucifer, a direct manifestation of the evil. In contrast, girls are as a rule, possessed. The evil is seldom identified with the girl; it remains outside of her control, which is being underlined by her becoming a different person, when the wickedness takes root in her. The exorcist is an illustration here, even if the little girl is the movie’s demoniacal center, it is not she, who is the active subject, but the demon, who speaks through her.

In Sundland’s video, we experience the same discomfort as we find in the horror-genre, but the characters still do not play out a story of possession, but occupies, through their non-controlled bodies, this affected attitude in loop. Thus, it is not an illusion of possession that we see in Sunland’s work, but an insistence on the necessity of reflection over this structure, as a reflection of the other, often patriarchal representation systems of the society. In this sense, the girl poses are mantras, which, by referring to the stereotypes of the horror movies, require, that we evaluate them in a wider context. This context is not only the possessed girl, but any form of stereotype presentation of the body within the control-mechanisms, like we see them being operative in the school system, popular culture, and other sub-cultural icons of the feminine as an object of desire.

-Thomas Kvam 2003