In I Gave My Love a Cherry that Had no Stone, the foyer of the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon serves as a stage for a choreography in which the body, space, and camera are directly interrelated. With movements that, hesitant and elastic at the same time, call to mind an avatar, a human figure moves through the foyer. Its aim cannot be identified; it instead seems to be propelled by external forces—the camera lying in wait for it, the space, whose atmosphere of abstract futurity makes any lingering in the present time impossible, and the figure’s own material shell, which threatens to dissolve and detach itself again and again, making the body into its own parodistic double. The scenery seems haunted by Dorothea Manning’s painting Some Roses and Their Phantoms—an arrangement of papery and undead-seeming flowers on a tablecloth with chiseled folds—, in which we recognise not only the colours of the museum’s interior, but also the spectral materiality of body and space, which oscillates between surface and volume, presence and absence. (Katrin Mundt)

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

• Sektion Section: Film
• Programm Programme: Emily Wardill 2