single channel video, CCTV Camera, praying mantis (3D print) acrylic print
Voice Over: Manaka Nagai

While the female narrator in the voiceover of Ring describes her job as a night security guard watching the rooms of a tax office via CCTV, the audience finds itself in the position of observer. The video contains a recording from a surveillance camera showing a woman in her private rooms. It remains unclear whether the voiceover belongs to this woman or if she can hear it at all. The nested perspectives of observing and being observed create an atmosphere of entertaining paranoia, while the unreliable narrator’s monologue jumps between everyday observations and imagination.

The result is a dense web of references and evokes the key feminist work “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In it, a husband prescribes absolute bed rest for his wife to treat her depression. Isolated and without external stimuli, she has nothing to do but look at the peeling yellow wallpaper in her room. The heroine becomes increasingly entangled in her fantasies and eventually develops delusions that lead her to believe that a woman is trapped in the ornaments of the wallpaper and needs to be freed. But her delusion is also an expression of a deeper truth: the heroine realizes that she herself is a prisoner.

• Sektion Section: Exhibition
• Programm Programme: Feelers, Sensors