on selected videos : KIKA NICOLELA

I WOULD BELIEVE ONLY IN A GOD WHO COULD DANCE, by Daniella Samad

Kika Nicolela is a “visual-filmmaker” artist. She graduated in Film Studies, but her videos are always exhibited in the art circuit. The videos that will be screened in both programs of this exhibition articulate between the boundaries of the pictorial and the corporeal.

In PASSENGER, the hand that holds the camera and records everything is guided by a deconstructive and deformative gaze, which breaks with the clear and formalist “good taste” look; the rain and the incorporeal light are the semantics that rule this blur of stains and liquids. It’s impossible not to recall the Impressionists. Nicolela makes us dive into a sea of Nympheas.

On the other hand, in NAKED the exposed body dialogs with the corporeal and rigid concrete of the city. The cement skin, the asphalt flesh, everything interpenetrates itself and inebriate us. The public becomes private and the private turns into public. Our experience as audience is ruled primarily by the sensorial, our awaken senses; we search for smells, and our gaze wants to scratch the fragile borders between what was shot and what was felt.

In ECSTASY POEM, the reference to the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman is obvious; we see the young and the current older Liv Ulmann in the same frame. The primordial issue here is time - the frozen, stagnated time.

Nicolela always dialogs amongst the subtle limits of the body, the being and its alterity, the reach of its identity on the relation to nature, other beings, the environment. Her palette constantly seeks this substantive body that is always searching for something.

FLUX returns to these same questions, and the reddish “filter” of the past video - between our gaze and surface of Liv’s image - is also found in this one, between the dancing woman, the horse and the nature. Many references are evoked, such as the Caravaggio reds, Peter Greenaway shooting style, the ever-present baroque: on the body gestures, on the lights, on the fluids etc.

WINDMAKER once more approaches the female issue and the search for herself amidst the nature, the wind, the water. The video is a true bluish poem, made of tenuous, dense and waterish blurs. This is what seduces me in Nicolela’s artwork, everything is always a pretext for the artist to reach pictorial matters, that she reveals on the act of editing the videos, her gaze-brush that all smudges, dislocates, deforms and shapes.

The wind also brushes us.

In TROPIC OF CAPRICORN, screened on the second program of the exhibition, social issues dialog now with this body-product. The question here is the body as product and its metamorphosis.

Her videos make us think about the place we have in the world; what meaning we seek? Through bodies that inquiries, that move, dance and glide, there is a mind that doesn’t want to dissolve itself, but that seeks on these videos’ fluidity a final meaning that, as Niezstche once said, dances on the earth surface.

Her videos have thickness, are made as fabrics meant to be touched; have texture, density; they seem to be made of cross-stitch or embroidery. Not only the revealed content is rich in significance and layers to be unveiled, but also the aesthetic is like a brush at work. We can perceive a same fingerprint that embraces them all: the body, its verses, reverses and knots, its relation to the urban and organic surroundings.

Dance and question oneself signifies to be in this world that we inhabit, and inhabit us.