Escalating perception
An essay by Katia Schurl (assistance curator, Kunsthaus Graz), published in -35/65+, two generations by Buchhandlung Walter König, Cologne, 2007
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Christian Niccoli's work revolve around relationship situations and behavioural patterns that can be observed in social systems such as "a pair of lovers" or "family". His chosen media are video and photography, but Niccoli does not use them in any way as documentary. On the contrary, his subject matters are dramatized, and the protagonists are players. However, Niccoli does borrow a sociological technique from documentaries, the interview, though using it without thereby laying any claim to a scientific approach or taking the interviews themselves as a methodological be-all-and-end all. He uses them to gather material, and this contains gaps that Niccoli appears to draw the essence of his work.
The Escalating Perception trilogy is about encounters or the difficulties that encounters involve in a post-modernist society.
In the double projection of The Gaze, people pass each other on escalators travelling in opposite directions. Gazes cross and recross, people look at each other by chance and inevitably, immediately averting their gazes and looking stonily ahead. No real contact takes place. The artist takes over instead, intervening for his actors at sound level.
"I like speaking to women", admits a man as passing by and immediately disappears from the picture. Another wants a partner with a child, while a woman of around 40 no longer wants to play the therapist. Where the picture suggests that eye contact is flirtation, the sound uses typical texts from lonely-hearts adverts. Niccoli thus juxtaposes two aggregate states of the dating game – harmless flirting and the need for specific relationships.
The second part of the trilogy, The Path, is about a rapid exchange of glance between two strangers. A young man and an elegant middle-aged woman approach each other on a lonely footpath in the countryside. We hear their thoughts offstage, revolving around themselves. The distance between them seems eternal until they finally meet and look each other in the eye for a fraction of second.
The perception of people opposite us in an increasingly virtual world is investigated in The Visual Need, the third part of Escalating Perception. Here Niccoli focuses his attention on Turkish culture, where the (female) face traditionally remains hidden. However, what Niccoli means by veil is mainly the television screen, which automatically relativises glace. The Visual Need is constructed as a triptych and shows alongside each other the faces of Turkish television stars, passing faces and young people in interviews.
All three films, although formally quite different, take a world flooded by media as a backdrop, where we are no longer even aware of faces that we see every day – until finally perception escalates.
©2007 christian niccoli. all rights reserved