Mounir Fatmi, The Blinding Light, 2013-16
Mounir Fatmi participates in the Cote Court festival, showcasing his 2016 short film The Blinding Light, which will be screened on 11 June at 10 PM and again on 14 June at 8 PM.
The Blinding Light is a black-and-white, 11 minute and 57 second long video made of several superimposed images. The backdrop is a painting by Fra Angelico entitled, The Healing of the Deacon Justinian, onto which several photographs and videos from a contemporary surgical unit were merged.
This tempera on wood painting by Fra Angelico is from one of the scenes on the predella of the altarpiece of Saint Mark dating from 1440 and located in the National Museum San Marco in Florence. The work traces different miracles of two saints, Como and Damian. In this scene, the brothers of Arab origin realize a posthumous miracle with the graft of the leg of an Ethiopian Moor who had just been buried in the cemetery of St. Peter of the deacon. The episode questions the notion of race and the hybridization of identity.
Overarching this idea of hybridization, in this video Fatmi operates a skillful game by marrying the Renaissance to hypermodernity. This temporal ellipse, superimposing the two space-times, renders the technology and the anesthesia divine, much as a miracle was held as divine.
May 28, 2017
