Mikhail
Karikis and video artist Uriel Orlow collaborated on the soundtrack for Orlow's
video 'A Dance of Life and Death'. This is what Orlow says:
Inspired by Holbein’s 1524 series of engravings, A Dance of Life and Death – performed by Cinema and TV locates in horror movies a contemporary equivalent to the macabre and humourous personification of death. In the Middle Ages, the dance-of-death genre was a way to deal with the threat of death (by the plague) in the midst of everyday life. Today death is omni-present, too and while represented in the media it is nevertheless in many ways profoundly repressed.
In this video, monsters and skeletons from recent horror movies are shown ‘dancing’ next
to clips taken from tv; death and life never quite meet but are constantly
facing each other, one threatening and affirming the other in a choreography
of images which flash up from the darkness of the screen. While the medieval
images of death dancing around and menacing the living were organised according
to a strict class hierarchy (from the pope to the pauper), the representation
of life that is broadcast on television through news, documentaries, advertising
and soap-operas is marked by selective out-takes, clichés, endless
repetition and arbitrary zapping.
This work was premiered in an exhibition at the Embassy of Switzerland
in London in May 2003. It was subsequently included in the 10th Biennial
of
the Moving Image at Saint-Gervais, Geneva in November 2003.
