Laura Pählapuu 'Two Hundred and Forty-three Postcards in Real Color'

“In my past art projects, I have worked with the question of staging documentary. I’ve researched, how a believable confusion can be created with artistic means. 'Two Hundred and Forty-three Postcards in Real Colour' deals with an oposite process, in a way. Here, I have taken half-accidental real documentary material and tried to add fictional qualities to it.

It is a video work, a system composed of eleven different visuals. I would call it a voice-over documentary, rooted in traditions of voyeurism. The visual material has been shot in the 18th quarter of Paris from a garret window of a house. Visually, these are distant etudes of neighboring house’s windows. For example, a woman ironing, businessmen having a roof picnic, a man with a phone walking back and forth on a balcony, a mother reading a story to a child, an old lady leaning on the edge of the balcony. The camera moves effortlessly between different floors, different rooms, and interactions, stopping briefly but in a concentrated way on each single story.

The title, 'Two Hundred and Forty-three Postcards in Real Colour', is taken from Georges Perec `s text of the same name. I’d like to also call my video works postcards, especially since they are exhibited in a rather small format. The result is a kind of mixture of play, perception and moving image. Each individual story is part of a whole - as a chapter of a book. A book you can keep on writing endlessly. And every story is a kind of fragmentary narrative - be it a logical or arbitrary extension of the image.”

The work has been previously shown at the Artishok Biennial II in 2010, and it is part of the KUMU collection.

We thank: Pernot Ricard Eesti, Ritums Ivanovs, Tanel Teimann, Ksenia Agarkova.