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by Art.Africa Sep 25, 2024
“The work often starts from an obsession with something; after that, we’ll make our way through associations that may shed light on a more emotional experience of it”
‘VIPER SNAKE, RED PAINT, HEAT WAVE.’ These words appear as subtitles towards the end of Daughter of Dog (2024), an enigmatic short video by Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, shown as part of their exhibition of the same name at Mostyn, Wales, earlier this year. The unlikely sequence of images conjured up by this incongruous phrase make me think of a whimsical version of the ‘what3words’ geolocating tool, the novel mapping-app that enables any three-metre square on Earth to be located using a unique combination of three words. It’s as if the words listed in the video might lead us to some specific, unknown location. Such an imagined encounter, of nonsense poetry being used to map ourselves onto the globe, feels appropriate in the context of Cohen and Van Balen’s practice, which uses video, sculpture and performance to create
