Melik Ohanian: Seven Minutes Before

This epic video installation is the first solo show of this French-Armenian artist in the UK. Installed across 7 screens, it makes the darkened gallery feel enormous and elegant. Each screen shows a continuous take as seven cameras roam across a 2 km stretch of valley in southern France. It begins with the story of a girl whose horses are mysteriously killed during a thunderstorm. The elliptical narrative is one of dream-like free association and cinematic cliché. It is scattered with mythical, Romantic symbols: wandering folk musicians, an eagle, a caged wolf, fire. Violin music evokes loss and the word memoria is chalked on rocks. There is a journey up the mountain and towards the end, a collision of a van and a motorbike and then a camper van is blown up loudly. Oblique references to art are woven into the action, including Smithson's Spiral Jetty and Beuys' I Like America And America Likes Me, both from the 1970s. For me these seemingly disconnected elements didn't resolve into a coherent narrative. As with the multi-screen video works of Runa Islam, Zineb Sedira and Isaac Julien, this is beautifully-shot but ultimately its refusal of narrative leaves me feeling slightly frustrated.

We watch the same scene from several perspectives, generally from above, which gives us a disorientating, God-like omniscience. Seven Minutes Before is an experiment in which the audience is invited to participate. Ohanian proposes an alternative form of editing, one that occurs in space rather than time. I think Michael Figgis's great film Time Code is a more successful investigation of this idea. He splits the screen into four and has four continuous takes playing simultaneously. The action of the story switches between each quarter, and you edit your own film. Ohanian's use of seven screens feels excessive. However, apparently the idea is to be active and to physically edit the film by moving around from screen to screen, as each screen had its own speakers and soundtrack. I need to go back to the SLG and try this technique. This installation really does require repeat viewing. In the gallery lounge, things start to make sense when you examine the large diagram and a 3-D computer model of the making of the work. I still find it a potentially empty formal exercise compared with Ohanian's more obviously political significant, and very interesting work, which the gallery screened last weekend, Invisible Film 2005. In this film Ohanian projects Peter Watkins 1971 masterpiece Punishment Park onto the bleak Californian desert where it was shot. This film, about the punishment of dissidents during the Vietnam War, is a searing condemnation of the US government with strong resonances against today's censorship over Iraq and the 'war on terror', Guantanemo Bay and the 'rendition' of political prisoners. The film is projected onto air, we only hear the soundtrack which evokes our memory of the film's action. The ghost of the movie haunts the place it was filmed, a comment on our inability to learn from the warnings of the past?

AMG