Ingeminated Battology

​Ingeminated Battology is a double channel video installation. The two flat-screens work together, and the image creates an illusion of a full mouth, although, in reality, the individual screens show the mirror image of each other. At different times, the two images slowly move in and out of sequence. Each moment on screen is specifically choreographed to create a sense of constant jarring that comes together in climactic harmony, and then loses its momentum again. The close up of the mouth opens and closes, sucks, licks, and attempts to create words, eventually showing a black tongue, mouth and partially black teeth, alluding to melancholia. The tongue is a liminal object – inside and outside, soft and hard. It deals with food, language and sexuality. In this work, I am interested in the subversion of all three.
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Installed in a small black room, generally no larger than 5m x 5m, there is a very close proximity to the images on the large screens. The floor of the room is covered in a thick and rich red carpet that creates a tactile feeling underfoot and echoes the red lips in the video – this connection between image and space creates an immersive environment that positions the audience almost within the mouth of/in the video.
The mouth connects to the grotesque body alluding to the entrance of the vagina; this oral cavity evokes the frightening maternal mouth threatening to engulf subjectivity, bordering on the ‘abyss of the female organ from which all life comes forth’ to quote Lacan. The mouth moves but it cannot speak or be heard, and it returns the female body from its repression in the symbolic, to the chora of indifferentiation. The video, and its immersive installation, harks a return to the state of the pre-Symbolic, and becomes both threatening and thrilling.