La Verdad Sobre Esta Obra: Loulou Cherinet

Galleri Niklas Belenius is proud to present The truth about this work (2010), a site-specific video installation by Loulou Cherinet that has recently been shown at Manifesta 8.

During a car trip through Slovenia we stopped at country store for supplies. We bought two litres of 96,6% pure alcohol. On the flight home we spiked our drinks with considerable amounts from one of the bottles. The taxi journey from Arlanda is eternally etched in my memory, it was sleet outside, and I cooled one hand through the open window and placed the other on her forehead. The lights along the motorway, the smell of leather from the car coupé, the cold air from the outside and the heat from the alcohol that incinerated and radiated through the delicate skin in her forehead. Imagine how the palm of our hand register hallucinatory fragments, how it reads and renders a meaningful message there in the backseat. Essential basic naive mental layers interacting with more defined and developed structures. Conclusions based on experience are in compromise with standpoints of a fundamental cultural, and moralistic nature. It is a cognitive narrative in real-time. Not a passive contemplation but a doing, an active acting. A hierarchy composed by forces and counter-forces that are unified and concluded in a densified story, in an image of a human being. An image fulfilled, containing all the unconscious material that the conscious has displaced, everything that do not exist in the official repertoire. It has to be real. The time in Washington, the welding sparks and the cigarettes. The time in Indonesia, the great paintings, the water leak in the ceiling. The return journey, the knife incident, love, impotency and insanity. The bars in Gothenburg, Hayward Gallery, Moderna Museet, Centre Georges Pompidou and the Mori Art Museum. The miracle in Vienna, the implausible high odds winner at the race tracks who saved the economy. And here we are – right at the heart of the result and at the centre of a construction – with access to new works. A configured basic material in a materialised format, half encoded, half projected or projected because it is encoded. Just lift your hand to the forehead and make yourself aware.

Linus Elmes, Oslo, 2010