Emma Hart’s practice is a course of action. Through video and performance she devises anarchic processes for the moving image, rethinking its mode of address and reception. The camera and projector are rejected as passive apparatus and become performative catalysts that inject uncertainty into the notion of original and copy. They are active agents, or Brechtian hammers*, with which she can smash, position and present her reality-in-question.

 

The (cause and) effect cameras have in the world, is zoomed in on through videos, lectures and projected performances, focusing on concepts such as arrows, pointing, holes, dimensions, lost things, looking, scripts, the future, running and risk. Always embedded in the work is a sense of inventing a new everyday. The production materials are simple; their cause and effect is compelling and complex. The work is rigorous, unorthodox and funny.

 

Through the explicit demonstration of production and by making her actual process the subject of the videos, Hart celebrates live action on the site of the photographic record. She is energetically testing out her belief that if the means of production (the lens based equipment) is made to take an active part in its resulting images, then the information it relays can be transformed from a document to a live presence; the time of making and of viewing can be experientially linked. Hart’s videos and performances produce rather than record - they act on the world rather than transmit it.

 

Based in London, Hart exhibits videos, installations and performs internationally. Her work has been presented at institutions including Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Camden Arts Centre, Battersea Arts Centre, Dundee Contemporary Art Centre and Cell Project Space. Hart frequently collaborates with other artists, often with Benedict Drew and their work was part of Nought to Sixty at the ICA and recently Performa 2009, New York.

 

* “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to smash it”

Bertolt Brecht.