Untitled 2019

0h 4min Director: Rajee Samarasinghe

A performance film consisting of a string of five slow motion portraits of a young woman—recalling the stillness of photographs. Each portrait varies in length and gesture as her myriad expressions invite our gaze. With each action performed in dead silence, stretched to the limits of voyeuristic levels of comfort, the simple act of looking is made fragile. A curious exchange is established between spectator, creator, and subject through a careful appropriation and reframing of social media conventions and advertising iconography transposed into a cinematic space—pointing to a cycle of regressive media consumption. This piece continues a series of cinematic works finding the colonial gaze in both the ethnographic image and forms of dominant media as a means to dismantle hegemonic structures found in the culture of image consumption.