ARTvonTRIER
Author: Malou Lykke Solfjeld
Co-Author: Christian Kortegaard Madsen

Europa: What I thought was forwards is backwards

What does it mean to the beholder to be beheld by the gaze of an artwork?
Is it comforting and reassuring, or is it threatening and captivating?
In the cinema, we are the spectators watching the screen. We sit in the darkness, anonymously out of sight, yet still together, facing the spectacle unfold in front of us. From the earliest days of film history there is a myth about the first screening of the Lumiere brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat in 1896, saying that the audience would scream in fear, jump up from their seats and run away, araid of the train heading directly towards them. This reaction truly signifies the Danish translation of moving images; that is living images.
After the Second World War, the cinema became a unifying place where people could come together and watch all sorts of narratives unfold, with the assurance that there would always be an end to it. Nowadays the screen has entered our private spheres, not only our living rooms where families used to gather around the TV, but even our bedrooms and bathrooms are now occupied by visual stimulation on demand through a broad variety of online streaming services.
The fact that we can always watch, also means that we are also always being watched. Our tiny cinemas that fit into our pockets and spend most of their time in our hands, also have a built-in camera. Through this lens we can look at ourselves and we can make the rest of the world look right back at us. We are constantly watching and constantly being watched. The gaze is a tool of power and control, the all-seeing, at most times invisible to the eye, has come to play a significant role in our everyday behavioral pattern.
According to the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the gaze flickers between the imaginary (what we see) and the symbolic (what we believe that we see). In-between this flickering lies the dominating fantasy of the other seeing us. In the gaze of the other, we wish to be an object of desire, as we ourselves desire the other as an object. The gaze is never fully satisfied, rather it is constantly on the pursuit for more to consume, and therefore leaves traces here and there and everywhere, without even paying attention to it, only to be tracked by big data collecting companies, who then get to decide where to next, one’s gaze will orientate. In an endless game of looking and being looked at, we consume each other through our eyes, our gaze, our screens, and most often we end up eating raw what is served to us. We decide to believe in the illusion, developed through our extended eye, the little cinema in our pocket.
What I thought was forwards is backwards can be seen as an image on how neither industrial, political, nor technological progression is solely moving in one direction. We are always engaging in a joint attention, a co- emergence of a mutual gaze.
In the lower part of the image we see a train, swiftly piercing through the cold night air, in which a row of lit windows stands out in the darkness as empty lightboxes connoting a strip of photographic film, with all the negatives illuminated side by side. The year is 1945, but we cannot see who the passengers are. Neither can they see us, as we are observing them from the darkness outside. All we can do is to accept that we are watching and being watched at the same time. Each of us inhabiting a negative – we are all part of the movie, the train of events, beholding the gaze of desire.