Liane Lang
Excerpt from Black Forest,
2005, sound, 2’40”
Lang’s video is filmed in a forest during winter. The viewer sees sun
shine between the trees from a low angle. Light and shadow moves in a steady
pace over the forest floor, towards a girl who sits sleeping up against a
tree.
The light’s floating and oscillating movement through the forest contrasts
the motionless girl. In Black Forest the human’s – and the Sun’s
pace has swapped places. This creates a worrying disorder in the notion of
time. Time flies by, while Man is locked in a numbing time warp – a state,
which only ends by the end of the work.
Through her works Liane Lang controls the notion of time. Either through photography
where she freezes it, through stop-frame animations where she creates it,
or through time-lapse sequences, where she compresses time and thereby makes
visible the mechanics of it. In recent time-lapse films, Lang ads the presence
of human figures who - rather than evolving with time, seem strangely trapped
within it.
Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen