work-16 hours

16 Hours

Behind the fictional construct of ’16 Hours’ lies a reality that becomes its driving force, a real moment of potential apocalyptic disaster. The documentary film( 1983 The Brink Of Apocalypse, 2008) explored a crucial point of friction between the Cold War superpowers of Russia and America. The documentary pin pointed this moment of possible catastrophe. Farhid was particularly interested in the voice-over and its use of language which she carefully edited and re-appropriated into the fictional scenarios of ’16 Hours’. This process has the effect of taking an event seemingly out of our control as individuals and refocusing a similar set of situations onto events of the everyday.

There is an apocalyptic theme that runs through this video; its structure is one of fragmentation and visual complexity in which strands of narrative are interwoven throughout the 16 minutes of its duration.These incomplete narrative strands are instrumental in referring to elements in a society that is in itself fragmenting and collapsing. We are presented with the real and the metaphorical, the actual and the symbolic as for instance documentary footage of prison violence is followed by images of recontextualised public spaces taken over by young skateboarders and ‘graphitiied’ to excess. This act of graphitii is in itself one of personal protest, a disruption of the state.