The feeling of strangeness that dubbing produces and the specific socio-political context in the Basque Country, forms the genesis of the project Llevo toda mi vida doblando (I’ve been dubbing my whole life) by Swedish artist Karin Dolk.
In her exhibition at the Bilbao Arte Foundation, Karin Dolk presents a group of video- and photographic works that questions ideas about language, translation, original/copy and identity.
«Dolk’s dubbing cut is, by way of analogy, a projection, in terms of a criticism of obscene representation, of the trompe-l’oeil in which the aim is not so much confusion with reality but rather the production of a simulation in full awareness of the game and artifice: exceeding the effect of reality to sow a doubt[1]. […]
It can be conceived in the photograph and also in the video as a fetishist mark of the encounter with the enigma of sexuality. In the perverse space, nothing is fixed, everything is mobile, there is no particular purpose. The photographer behaves like a voyeur and, to a large extent, Karin Dolk positions us in her works like the peeping Toms, which, as we have indicated, are the “invisible actors”, those who put their voice to the translation of the original. [..] When we try to achieve an identity, we listen to something that has to do with suffering or we could even understand that what is produced is a strict negation of the subject. […]
Karin Dolk returns again and again to the question of the impossibility of communication, as if between what one wants to say and what the other finally experiences there were an unsurpassable wall rather than a veil. […] This artist is undoubtedly aware of the fact that the codes never stop. That is why her work reduces those extraordinary speculations at the same time as they compose a kind of heterotopia or, to use Dällenbach’s words, a constantly changing story[2]. “Nowadays, the codes of representation fall apart in favour of a multiple space whose model can no longer be painting (the “picture”) but would rather be theatre (the stage), as announced, or at least desired, by Mallarmé”[3]. Karin Dolk’s videos force us to think about a stage of what is not visible which has finally been revealed: that of those who put their voice to the Other. »
[1] “The trompe-l´oeil is not exactly a part of art or the history of art: its dimension is metaphysical” (Jean Baudrillard: De la seducción, Ed. Cátedra, Madrid, 1987, p. 64).
[2] Cf. Lucien Dallenbach: El relato especular, Ed. Visor, Madrid, 1991, p. 210.
[3] Roland Barthes: S/Z, Ed. Siglo XXI, Madrid, 1980, pp. 45-46.
