Sharon Lockhart: Goshogaoka / NO

Films by Sharon Lockhart

»Goshogaoka« [1997, 16mm, 63 min.]

»NO« [2003, 16mm, 31 min.]

Sharon Lockhart bases her cinematic works on a consistently linear construction of time. In the films, »Goshogaoka« and »NO«, which are being screened as part of the accompanying programme for the exhibition fast forward. Media Art|Goetz Collection, a staged sequence of events develops, which in terms of its action is radically reduced to everyday activities with no drama or climax, the decisive factors being the beginning and the end. In none of the films does the camera move. The action unfolds in the fixed framework of the recording format with no zooming or panning. People and actors enter and move around in the picture, but it is clear that they also continue their activities outside it. In 1996, Sharon Lockhart was a scholarship holder of the Asian Culture Council in Ibaraki District to the north of Tokyo, where she was able to observe a number of girls undergoing basketball training for her film Goshogaoka. Intensive cooperation developed with the then Director of Ballet at the Frankfurt Opera House, Stephen Galloway, and a choreography was rehearsed that was based on different stages of the training, such as warming up, running and throwing, individual ball control, attack and defence, rest periods and massage.

A landscape picture is removed from the flow of time and withdraws from the noise of the world. It is the expression of a design, by means of which we can obtain knowledge of reality. NO is a landscape picture of this kind. The bottom part is filled with dark soil. Above a small strip of tall grasses that shimmer silvery-white the reddish-brown foliage of a row of trees hides the roofs of two smallish buildings. A range of hills rises on the left. Chains of hills appear beneath a grey sky on the left. It is autumn somewhere in Japan.