Seven Trials

The film consists of three studies: deceleration, equilibrium currents, antizoetrope.

Kalah is an old Arabic mathematical game, played by two people with 72 stones. The film is a "mapping" of the moves of a game that ends in a draw: each stone corresponds to a sound and a colour.

The film’s frame is a collage of horizontally trisected frames in which three views can be seen. Each of these three sections of the image shows a separately recorded one-second-long camera pan shot in the artist’s studio. The camera pans were filmed with a 16 mm film camera equipped with three different types of lenses (wide-angle, normal and telephoto). The resulting footage was divided horizontally into three strips and rearranged into new collaged compositions, each lasting 32 seconds, which were mechanically printed together into a single 35mm film.

Dóra Maurer once said that the central theme of her work is "movement and the conceptual and factual effects of shifts". As her extensive oeuvre since the late 1960s shows, movement and displacement are always related to systemicity and structurality. The starting point of a certain, previously established system and the subsequent discovery of unforeseen deviations and breaks in this double characterizes the process that Maurer has realized in a variety of ways from her early graphic works to what she calls shifts to the "quasi-pictures" of the 1980s and 90s, developed from spatial painting.