“Take the ribbon from my hair, shake it loose and let it fall. Layin’ soft against your skin, like the shadow on the wall …” sings Gladys Knight and reading this is as if we can hear her clearly. But we cannot hear her. Not as such. Her imagined song becomes Emily Wardill’s film as it becomes her words. As if in a silent karaoke, transformed into the film’s title, her backing group The Pips have been replaced. Their silence, that of this work, is also hers, as if better to describe the song, or to replace that song with description itself, one that has no sound in order to be of the body, of flesh, as well as of the line drawn in time and space into which description also dissolves. The ribbon from her hair is in the gymnast’s hands. It carves out volumes, passageways, spirals that do not exist but that are as tangible as a body. It extends the body, its movements and the tiny flick of a wrist. (Ian White)

Courtesy the artist and Carlier Gebauer, Berlin, STANDARD (OSLO) and Altman Siegal, San Francisco

• Sektion Section: Film
• Programm Programme: Emily Wardill 3