The Face – Storefront for Art & Architecture

A pie in the face is as old as cinema itself. In this essay, an ode to activism, Sasha Pirker pays tribute to the original pie-thrower Mabel Normand, the pioneering Alice Guy Blaché, the illustrious ballerina Anna Pavlova and her eponymous confections…

Sasha Pirker´s conceptual experiment Closed Circuit, 2013 is a meeting of two analog formats – Polaroid and 16mm film – as well as of the predetermined units of time and the aesthetic aspects inherent in each material. In this work, the development time of Polaroid images correlates with the predetermined length of a 16mm film reel, which is three minutes – exactly the length of Pirker´s single-take film. The subject gradually peels itself into the picture, revealing a woman with a movie camera, or perhaps even the production process itself. The short, very concise film thus makes it possible to directly observe the development of a photographic image in an ambiguous gesture – the process of developing a static image using moving images – thus causing the viewer to reconsider the specifics of the respective media (photography and film) that have been directly interwoven in this piece.