the kiss

2000
Video and sound installation.
Projection within breeze block house.
450 x 280 x 280 cm
7 minutes 44 seconds

The Kiss is staged as a wall projection in an underground club like setting, to the steady beat of House music (2000). Wooden floorboards, breezeblock walls and rubber curtains that hang in the openings of this purpose built room, give the work a strong olfactory dimension. Like the Munch painting from 1897, which it references, The Kiss shows two lovers, a man and a woman, locked in embrace. Time is as if suspended, so absorbed they are in the kiss. Barely breathing, barely moving, they mesmerise us, they make us hold our breath too. An over exposed 16mm film merges the lovers’ faces into a single bleached form, and the little marks of colour, like a red bracelet, flare up. Bodily boundaries blur and distinct elements appear like blotches on an abstract canvas. Only the slow yet passionate movement of fingers, as hands rub gently against body, betray the impossibility of this image of contained desire, and un-freeze its painterly stasis.