Walking and Talking
Hamza Halloubi
(2018)
Single-channel video installation, 6:21 min.
In Walking and Talking (2018-2019) we listen to a message to a friend, an appeal made from a museum in London, where a woman reflects on her position as an African in a European museum of modern art. She speaks about concerns such as identity, class and artistic heritage and questions the position of a non-Westerner in relation to modern Western art: that very Western art which, while making a claim to universality, also excludes other narratives. The technique used for the video is not a voice-over, but a voice-on. The image of the narrator's mouth is a means of accentuating the physical presence of the voice. By situating the English transcript of the text in the middle of the image, Halloubi allows the viewer to be 'guided' through the decoding of horizonless images which have a certain weightlessness due to their circular shape.