	POPI KROUSKA “evening news” Video installation 18 - 26 May 2006 On a construction site at Psirri, Athens

EVENING NEWS

The approach to fear. Through three monitors. In three dimensions.

I am a spectator of events. Willing, or even addicted. I store information. I try to turn my thoughts and feelings into image, even though I know that each evening the rules of the game keep changing again and again before my eyes, on the screen.
   Aggressors and victims. And the story of the new century is written under new circumstances and new models.
   These I try to express with my own media.
   Dipped into the red of blood.
   Using as the heroes multicoloured warriors, brought from the future of our childhood.

“O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest

Burning”

‘On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.’
la la

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest

burning

T. S. Eliot ‘ The Waste Land ’ (verses 300 – 311)

I collect my material from television, from the cinema through television or from my own shootings of photos or video. So basically broadcast information and news bulletins are the beginnings of the thread. There are events that overwhelm me. I record and process them, and in my effort to express my feelings and thoughts I resort to the use of film excerpts or to material I have shot myself.

The video-installation “evening news” comprises three screenings on three different screens, all of which form the overall impression.
The first monitor, events, shows the suffering people – dead, wounded, victimised, terrorised. These are interspersed with some auxiliary subjects such as the cartoons among the dead children from Beslan and Iraq.
The second monitor, spectator, is the image of fear; the cringing of fear.
The third monitor, the model, shows the ‘theory’ of the events. The supernatural, heavily armed, invincible, heroic warriors in a sequence of lightning action very similar to those of computer games. It is an excerpt from the opening of James Cameron’s film Terminator 2, digitally processed into a multicolour extravaganza. A running strip on the screen –like the advertising messages on TV during a programme– shows a poem: an excerpt from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

Popi Krouska

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English translations by Tony Moser