ESCALATING (2013)
Excerpt of 2 channel projection
Text by Sharon Grace, artist and writer :
“ Maya Smira's video installation is a folded loop of video images that present an overview of a pair of escalators, one ascending and the other going down. The destinations linked by the escalators do not appear, and audience is drawn to the movement of the mobile stairs and the bodies that pass through the relatively narrow window established by the framing of the camera. The video allows us to interogate the delivery systems of late corporate capitalism, which promise objects and objectives, but appear to deliver human bodies only to further delivery systems. By focusing on this apparent space of transition between “from” and “to”, the concept suggests that there is something fundamentally uninhabitable in the center of this circular logic. The objects and spaces orient knowledge and provide the context we call “history” seem to have slipped away. We are left to contemplate the extraordinary dif culty of nding a place to stand in time.
Maya's installation shows the audience a closed circuit of the 21st Century Flanarie, where time is relentlessly machine coded. “