Friday, November 18, 2011

Aida Ruilova, Goner @ Salon 94 Bowery



Man, I walked into the rather large video projection when a bloody women staring dazed as a heavily breathing person from behind the camera is beating her. Putting me in the rather uncomfortable position of beating up this otherwise rather attractive woman. As the thrashing goes on, the camera occasionally sweeps the faded purple carpet or lingers on the details of the room, the broken mirror, the heart-shape bed, making for a very engaging visual backdrop for violence. 

All the while, the video keeps cutting back to the rather vicious assault that crescendos with the women attacking herself with a butcher knife and cutting open her own Achilles tendons, just as the violence gets to much to watch the attack becomes fantastical with blades jutting out from the wall. Reducing the violence of domestic battery which mutates into self-mutilation to a much more palatable violence of your average horror movie. I assume highlighting the misogyny in horror films might be some of the point but it feels more like and easy out, that lets the viewer off the hook, from having to process why you might have just sat through a rather extended period of first person violence? 


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Salon 94 Bowery, 243 Bowery, Btw. Stanton St. & Rivington St.)

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