“History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken,” wrote James Joyce. The video works of Minnette Vári suggest a similar sentiment. Presenting herself as the protagonist of her own dark and dreamlike fables, Vári has attempted to confront the ghosts of the past. Early video works like Alien (1998) and Oracle (1999) were harsh, cathartic expositions. Made in the first years of the new South African democracy, the artist assumed the role of an unwilling collaborator in an inescapable history.
In The Calling (2003) Vári immersed herself in a story of Johannesburg. Talking of her insider/outsider relationship to the elusive and ever-changing metropolis, Vári says, “I do think of it as my city but I don’t necessarily feel that the city itself feels I belong to it . . .” Playing out the role of the perpetual fugitive, Vári strapped objects such as a sickle and a meat-grinder, burdens symbolic of squashed-up histories and identities, to her naked body and climbed onto a narrow balcony rail thirty-two floors above street level. As she crawled perilously along it, she experienced a strong sense of foreboding that she would not survive—as did the viewers.
Rebus (2008), a two channel video, is, as its title implies, a puzzle that must be interpreted. It’s an enigmatic array of images making up a complex presentation exploring multiple notions of “renaissance” and “enlightenment,” including the history and renaissance of South Africa, in which Vári takes the role of recording angel, robed in white.
The vertical intersecting axis of the floor-to-ceiling transparent cruciform screen allows multiple scenarios to overlap. On screen we see a play of mutating forms that reference Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia (1514).Vári transforms Dürer’s allegorical engraving of knowledge and alchemy by mixing his objects with her own. His ladder remains, as do many of the tools, but his comet arced by a rainbow is replaced by a roiling sky under which the continuous progression of history passes. We see people in a single-file queue, refugees, wedding celebrants, soldiers, a procession of academics. In this allegory of saturnine mysticism, Dürer’s shadowy skull is absent, but the shadowlands of death seem ever-present. Vári’s signature monochromatic video casts a ghostly blue-gray light while Dürer’s curled-up skeletal dog wanders like a moving X-ray across the screen.
Dürer’s personification of melancholia—one of the four “humors,” or temperaments, of Greco-Roman medicine and the one seen as most conducive to contemplative creation—posits the artist as central to knowledge and transformation. While Dürer’s seated figure of Melancholia is fixed in ponderous contemplation, Vári’s figure rises to meet her world. Accompanied by a strident soundtrack, the cacophony of metallic tools put to work, Vári’s Rebus both makes and unmakes history, mirroring the artist’s transformative task.
Rebus 2008
Two-channel digital video installation
Channel 1: 2 minutes 30 seconds; Channel 2: 1 minute 30 seconds; Stereo audio 4 minutes; looped
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Michael Hall
© Minnette Vári
The Calling 2003
Two-channel digital video installation stills
Video and stereo audio: 3 minutes, looped
Image courtesy of the artist and the Serge Ziegler Galerie, Zurich
Photographer: Andri Stadler
© Minnette Vári
Virgil 2007
Digital video installation
Duration 3 minutes, 45 seconds, sound
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
© Minnette Vári
The Falls III 2008
Pigment print on cotton fiber paper
80 x 80 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
© Minnette Vári
The Falls V 2008
Pigment print on cotton fiber paper
80 x 80 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
© Minnette Vári
The Falls II 2008
Pigment print on cotton fiber paper
80 x 80 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
© Minnette Vári