‘Dani Marti & Katri Walker’
This is an exciting space to go into, diving off Salmarket through a thick curtain into a black maze of rooms with an array of videos. It’s like entering a secret world, filled with tales and distant lands.
Walker presents a five-monitor . portrait of ‘Catalina’ a Mexican woman whose vocation is to mourn for the dead in long vigils next to the laid-out deceased. Each screen reveals a different aspect of her life: getting married, going to a baseball match, talking of here experiences. It’s somewhere between TV documentary and those artist who train an unwavering lens on an unawary eccentric, yet far more considerate than either. Walker’s other central American subjects are as engaging.
Marti moves in a a more personal and intimate direction . With three friends he records a camping trip to Australian outback. In an isolating and internalising sojourn the group of middle-aged men discuss their lives and how they govern them, revealing far too much in what they emphasise and what they downplay. It’s like Big Brother but with people who are not there bbecause they want to be on the cover of trashy magazines.
The absorbing environment takes you out of your own life. And once you are back on the streets, it alerts you to the countless stories that await you.
Martin Vincent