Single channel video, 5 min. 2009-10.  Click HERE

“The dead weight of a sleeper drifts between the syncopal darkness of the cinematic night and the waning daylight of a world that feels no less other. Shifting between modes of cinematic identification, inhabiting surrogate bodies and self obliteration in the face of the familiar Half Light sensitively makes manifest a mesmeric, recondite and affective territory.” – Tai Shani

EXHIBITIONS
2009 Star Maker. e:vent gallery, London.  Curators: David Burrows & Mark Harris.
2010 Live Weekend: Tai Shani. Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Curator: Tai Shani.

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Half Light is a meditation on exile, told in part through the metaphor of light bleeding into darkness, and of its reverse.  It represents a shift in a way of working, and is also a highly personal reflection on what might be the limits of subjective agency, of the act dissolving into larger fictions both present and perhaps inescapable.  Borne from a trip home to the States, it enmeshes different temporalities and orders of production, splicing together footage generated in situ specifically for the work, footage taken from a personal archive shot nearly a decade earlier in London, and footage taken from the internet materialising images from an interior psychic space.  It attempts to address, more overtly than in previous works, the mechanics of cinematic identification – in this case arising from a fascination with how Christian narratives structure the subject and how this permeates, in particular, the American mass media.  (The UK versus US versions of Leona Lewis’ Bleeding Love video provide a neat example.)  It also draws influence from Jean Cocteau’s Orphée and readings of Alain Badiou and other philosophers contemplating ‘event’.