Video installation, 2006, at M HKA Antwerpen 2007 “Lonely at the Top”, curators Dieter Roestraete & Grant Watson. The title of Marie Julia Bollansée’s work refers to an old Etruscan city near Rome. Tarquinia was the most important of the twelve cities of the Etruscan League and is now an archaeological site primarily known for its necropolis – an underground cemetery containing more than six thousand tombs, many of which are decorated with splendid colourful murals. However, of this partially macabre history hardly a trace can be found in Bollansée’s “Tarquinia”, a three-part projection in which a festively laid table with an ever changing line-up of guests is the central point – a picture which is loosely based on Tarquinia’s ancient wall paintings. Although associations with the iconographic tradition of the Last Supper are brought to mind, “Tarquinia” definitely plays on a different emotional register – that of a festive beginning rather than that of a majestic fatal ending.
Video installation, 2005, at LOKAAL_01 Breda 2007, Burning Marl, curator Frederik Vergaert in Seppenshuis Zoersel, 2005. A woman walking through 3 video images. Three screens display how the day’s light passes by: from the early morning light until late at night. Along with the woman the artist walks through the forest, in the same rhythm, the same pace. Off-screen she looks through the camera, fragmenting time. The age-old androgynous trees are a vertical constant along which the woman moves, as if in an interval between visibility and invisibility, between sound and silence, while the light keeps on evolving metabletically.
Video installation, 2004, in Kunsthalle Lophem, curator Roland Patteeuw. Film sequences of one and the same woman are projected next to each other on different screens. 9 characters with, apparently, their own stories without beginning or end. A woman dissociates into 9 personalities but only one at the time can manifest itself in front of the camera. It is as if one of the characters temporarily borrows the space in the woman, in order to become image. Without any formal directions imposed upon her, the woman sculptures herself nine times from within herself. Unbearably fragile and incompatible with the will of our ego. So the origin of the work can be situated in a grey area of reality where thinking, feeling and observing have fallen apart irreversibly and now try to come closer to each other again.
