Resistance Domination Secret

Three screen digital video
Bronze mask on turntable

Two wartime dramas, separated by 2,000 years of culture, become the basis for Waller's recent video work. One is Aeschylus' ancient Greek epic tragedy The Oresteia, the other is Marcel Carné's occupation period film Les Visiteurs du Soir. It is Argos, the tenth year of the Trojan War, the year the prophets say that Troy will fall. A watchman has been posted on the roof, waiting for a beacon that will signal Agamemnon's victory and alert his wife, Clytemnestra for his assassination. It is also 15th century France, two envoys have been sent from hell to disrupt a marriage ceremony. The two stop time and enter a bitter existential conflict on the perversion of love for one another.

Review:

Inrockuptibles, no 656 / 24 june 2008

As darkly humorous as tragic, a video by Mark Aerial Waller crosses an intruiging vein of British video art. There is a line of British videoartists truly without equivalent in France situated at the crossroads of Oscar Wilde and Monty Python, between cult and high dandyism, with a taste for the darkly absurd. Their videos develop, in five minutes, the destiny of people in ancient costume, more often than not in a baroque style, capes, collars and jabot shirts. The literary dialogues are proclaimed with ceremony in the poignant and serious tone of great tragedy. We discover Mark Aerial Waller's video at France Fiction, interlaced between two monumental histories, The Oresteia by Aeschylus and Les Visiteus du Soir, a film by Marcel Carné. These are two stories of conspiracy and betrayed love, seen through a strangely beautiful filter of costumes, postures and décor. Filmed in Istanbul, the passages of Orestes only just contrast with the black and white film of Carné, certain scenes are even replayed. A terrifyingly beautiful masquerade video where visual effects and editing return a travesty of emotion.

Exhibitions (as complete trilogy)
Cell Projects, London 2010
Nicoletta Rusconi, Milano, 2011

Exhibitions (before completion of all )
Solo: The Flipside of Darkness, South London Gallery, 2008
Solo: Resistance Domination Secret, France Fiction, Paris, 2008
Group show: L'Art Contemporain en Euroope, Experience Pommery#5, Reims, France
live performance with "       "; sic; Tim Goldie, 0-60, ICA, London, 2009