Frances Hegarty

LARGE video installations can have a bit of a problem in Project's front gallery

LARGE video installations can have a bit of a problem in Project's front gallery. Blockading the entrance to the main exhibition space, as Nick Stewart did previously for his Landscape with Watchtower, and Frances Hegarty has now done for her Voice Over installation, is possibly something done in an attempt to emulate the type of chamber that can be effortlessly constructed (and frequently is) at international megashows.

The comparatively small size of the space at Project, however, means that such large scale constructions do not necessarily succeed in adding a level of physical presence to delicate video work. They may, just as easily, make the work seem rather overblown.

For Voice Over, Frances Hegarty has built a small, dark chamber which visitors enter through a narrow gap. Inside there are two video screens embedded in the facing wall. This wall is incomplete, and through another gap it is possible to see the end wall of the gallery, onto which a wave form, apparently associated with the video soundtrack, is projected.

Voices, coming from two speakers in the walls of the chamber, at first link with the images of the refugee women seen in close up on the monitors. They speak in languages that are not English. Following the documentary convent ton, after the women have said a word or two, another voice obliterates their speech, offering what is assumed to be the English translations of their words.

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There is undoubtedly a density to the work, but the engagement with the issues never seems more complex or subtle than any number of television reports on similar subjects, a fact which seems to render the making of yet another "fireman" artist's response to the situation in the former Yugoslavia (even a feminist one) a dubious enterprise.