Remote Control, Remove Control

Overview

Fernando José Pereira’s Remote Control, Remove Control is a two-part video installation that was commissioned for Sharjah Biennial 9. The first video is composed of images taken in winter from a web cam in Bolungarvik, a village in the far north of Iceland. Pereira used these images to make a video in his studio in Portugal about a place he had never visited. The second video consists of similar images taken on location by Pereira during the Artist’s visit to the same Icelandic village in the summer.

The two films capture the village during different seasons, highlighting the strange absence of people from the landscape during both summer and winter. In one of the scenes the camera settles on a window that displays a poster printed with the word 'HELP.' Captured in person and through web cam, the lonely landscape of Bolungarvik appears almost as a fictional place. In Sharjah, the films were projected in a specially constructed replica of an Icelandic building – strangely out of place with its suggestion of an arctic climate – the work further introduced a number of intriguing paradoxes.


This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 9