Michael John Whelan
Video Installation
Film
Photography
Objects
Paper & Sound
Info
News
Frontier
Now the shadows I measure
An echo and a shadow
Mercer
Baribal
The sun shone on the
nothing new

Reprieve
A Perfect Circle
Assembly
Kindred
Clearing
Since
The Memoirs of a Madman
And penance is the play
Cathedral
Frontier
2016
two channel video, colour, sound
10:30 min
(1/4) Next




This work takes as a starting point the appearance of a white humpback whale off the coast of the Arctic archipelago Svalbard in 2012. A fractured narrative is constructed across two screens intertwining and juxtaposing both found and originally created footage. The found footage consists of dozens of digitally recorded albino appearances of animals from all over the world, distorted visually to the edge of abstraction. The originally filmed footage is of different parts of the coastline of Svalbard, facing the Arctic Ocean. Both visual positions appose the unseen and the recorded, the absent and the digitally present. Using this imagery in combination with subtitles and sound, Frontier explores albinism as a genetic phenomenon and an attraction often resulting in abuse and ritual persecution. The subtitles originate from three sources: testimonies from Tanzanian and Malawian albinos, scientific studies into the relationship between radiation from Chernobyl and the increase in albinism in birds, and the original dialogues in the background of the found footage from the internet.