Portraits of Shanghai
Sarah Beddington's films are slow, beautiful and drift along on a sleepy tide of non-linear, impressionistic images.
They immediately bring to mind the films of Tacita Dean, the Turner Prize-nominated artist whose own slow films provide nostalgic portraits of places that, even if not geographically remote, give off a sense of poetic otherness. Inevitably, both artists' works are tinged with a sense of sadness and loss.
Beddington's film, the poetically titled Shanghai Moon, is a four-screen production that provides a portrait of Shanghai. And, like Dean's work, instead of bringing us closer, the scenes, which are filmed with a static camera, leave us feeling a sense of the peculiar strangeness of the city.
The four screens play at separate intervals, and each screen occasionally shows a segment of a scene filmed at different angles, making it look as if we're viewing the image through a series of mirrors.
Quite ordinary scenarios are played out: a man with his back to the camera twiddles his ears; couples do a twirl on the dance floor; barges make their way towards Shanghai.
But at over an hour long, these languorous, achingly poetic moments can have the viewer drifting off, too.
Sarah Beddington: Places Of Laughter And Of Crying
Bloomberg SPACE
Finsbury Square, EC2A 1HD
