#aidaruilova

Aida Ruilova - Oh no

Previous artist research which has influenced my work for the FMP.

I’ve been looking at Aida Ruilova, a modern artist who frequently uses video art. A lot of her work makes you feel quite uncomfortable or tense, its choppy and repetitive and very similar to the kind of thing I’d like to create. With most of her videos she focuses on creating a feeling/atmosphere rather than creating a narrative/story, which I really like. It captures raw emotion rather than capturing it after being processed and put into words or edited. One of my favourites of hers is called ‘’Oh No’’, it makes me feel unsettled and this sense of dread. It shows Aida saying the phrase ‘’Oh no’’, walking along the necks of plugged in electric guitars, with their strings twanging very un-melodically, repeated on a loop over and over again. She layers the audio so it builds up at points and the repetition of the clips become increasingly rapid, creating this pretty intense experience.  

The atmosphere of each piece really varies. For example, her video piece ‘Immoral Tales’ is slow and sexual, with soft focusing and no shot changes,  whereas her video titled ‘Goner’ is much more tense and frantic, her use of almost total silence in this piece really heightens the on-edge feeling you get from watching it. ‘’Goner’’ also has a bit more of a narrative in comparison to the others. I find some of her collage work really strong too.

Aida Ruilova - Goner

I felt this video has similarities that I am trying to show in the artwork for assignment two. The invisible binaries and culture that create us, we contribute to all these things and we seem to want these binaries in a way. This video of a women, looks as if shes waiting in a nice room for a lover with her heart shaped bed is soon turned into a victim where the perpetrator is invisible.I felt like this related to the binary question because we feel the binaries all around us and if we don’t fall into one or the other it can be painful and we get treated differently, a hostile environment waits for us. When I saw this I also thought of something Roland Barthes writes about when he talks about culture touching us deeply and is created through both consumers and creators. He explains these moments of realisation as violent they “prick me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”