Desire and what you end up doing, 2010, Video Stills
Barbara Kapusta works through fictionalised or virtualised scenarios in order to examine our contextual and psychological relationship to society and reality based on the differing perspectives and viewpoints of her characters. Conceptually (and visually) she utilises a methodology of formalist and abstract construction presenting us with an intensified and enhanced construct of reality. Her current video and installation Desire and what you end up doing may be as much about an assessment of societal constraints and constructs as it may be an analytical assessment of individual neurosis.
Her script is a text that changes and is improvised in the very moment of filming. Her characters are fictional and are denoted as A, B and C, with each character corresponding to one color — white, red and black. Kapusta also includes a narrator. The characters and narrator mark separate positions or states of mind, reflecting through their individual vantage points. However, at times these individual entities collapse and breakdown as their voices shift out of synchronization.
Desire and what you end up doing, 2010, Installation view, RMIT Project Space
In filming and working Kapusta attempts to shift perspectives from the visual (our awareness of form and structure) and of the actors acting, to an awareness of actuality as she affords her actors the opportunity to interweave personal reflections or genuine stories within the video footage. In this Kapusta crosses through fiction and reality implicitly critiquing pictorial representation in moving image by interspersing the script with the actors personal reflections. However, her intention is not to tell us which is which, reinforcing the notion that it doesn't matter what is real and what is fiction, because what is real will have resonance to one viewer as fiction, while what is fiction will have resonance to another as a reality.
Kapusta seems to wish to invoke an unsettled or restless space through her use of disorientation and the presentation of different points of view. More particularly Kapusta seems to be exploring the parameters of spaces—personal, psychological, perceptual, societal, visual and virtual—where her implicit questioning of fiction and actuality may be meant as a critique of the present moment. (Peter Westwood)
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Desire and what you end up doing
2010
HD 16:9
Colour, Sound
07:55 min
Installation of seven screens
2010
Wood, Fabric
2,10m x 1,25m
3 Digital prints
2010
framed
42 x 50cm
untitled (landscape)
2010
HDV 16:9,
Colour, Sound
07:42 min
Cast: James Deeth, Begajeta Voloder, Miyuki Watanabe and Lucinda Wilmot
Sound: Martin Kay
Assistant: Mark Reid
Thanks to
Peter Westwood, Stephen Gallagher, Andrew Tetzlaff, RMIT, AIR Krems, Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, the Arts and Culture, Vienna, Ceri Hann, Philip Samartzis, Dominic Redfern, Sally Mannall, Kieren Seymour & Stephan Lugbauer