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Time after time

Runa Islam 

Ryszard Dabek
Eyeline 75
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To describe the work of Runa Islam as ‘cinematic’ is in itself something of a misnomer. For while Islam’s practice engages the pictorial and technical apparatus of the cinema it denies, for the most part, the more obvious pleasures one associates with the form. By largely rejecting the devices of spectator identification and narrative suspension, Islam foregrounds a program of investigation that is clearly aligned to both a history of experimental film and avant-garde art. Her exactingly composed film-based installations can be seen as engaging and re-animating a range of strategies and subjects that run the gamut from structuralist film to brutalist architecture. However, the idea of the cinema is never far from the surface of her work, often as a paradoxical presence that is simultaneously engaged and interrogated.

Indeed one could argue that Islam’s project to date has been primarily concerned with the interrogation of the very idea of engagement. The 2010 survey show of her work at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) provided the opportunity for viewers to investigate this progressively rigorous and at times formally austere line of enquiry. The exhibition was the fruit of a joint curatorial initiative between the MCA and the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal. It featured six works selected by the curators Rachel Kent and Mark Lanctôt from the past seven years of Islam’s practice, as well a jointly commissioned new work, Magical Consciousness (2010). For Australian audiences this show was especially timely following on as it did from the artist’s well-received inclusion in the Queensland Art Gallery’s 6th Asia-Pacific Triennial.

In the words of Rachel Kent ‘…Runa Islam explores the intellectual and physical properties of film in her practice’... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Runa Islam, Magical Consciousness, 2010. Still, anamorphic 16mm black and white film, silent. Image courtesy the artist and White Cube, London. © The artist. 

Runa Islam, Magical Consciousness, 2010. Still, anamorphic 16mm black and white film, silent. Image courtesy the artist and White Cube, London. © The artist. 

Runa Islam, Scale (1/16 inch = 1 foot), 2003. Stills and installation view, super 16mm film on DVD (two screen projection), sound. Image courtesy the artist and White Cube, London. © The artist. 

Runa Islam, Scale (1/16 inch = 1 foot), 2003. Stills and installation view, super 16mm film on DVD (two screen projection), sound. Image courtesy the artist and White Cube, London. © The artist.