Art

Whether intentional or not, the rumbling traffic sounds from Shoreditch High Street provide an extra layer to Ruth Hinkel-Pevzner’s five-screen installation ‘The Car’. Against fragmented sepia footage from the Russian State Film Archives – generic street scenes of traffic and passing pedestrians – Hinkel-Pevzner has added an equally fractured soundtrack of a female voice (sometimes overlapping female voices) that recount, in a narrative that moves sequentially across the five screens, the repeated, emotionally anxious search and wait for one particular car.
Whether this is a longing for a lost lover or a metaphor for a more general sense of absence is ambiguous, but the feeling of melancholy in both the juddering, slo-mo visuals (a fuzzy pixellation of old film footage digitalised for DVD), and the mournful voiceover create a mood that just about stays on the right side of nostalgia and poetic sentimentality.

With its feel of empty abandonment and echoing acoustics, the industrial, slightly grubby, bare-brick surrounds of the old Nichols and Clarke building might have been the perfect setting for a work about the quest for someone or something missing, but here it’s the work itself that may be in the wrong place; the five suspended screens and the amplified sound feel too exposed a setting for what should be an intimate piece. There aren’t many occasions when it’s preferable to don headphones and sit alone in a small dark room to engage with a work, but perhaps this is one of them.