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Sara Pathirane

Holding Clouds

Vidéo | hdv | couleur | 9:40 | Finlande | 2018

Holdind Clouds depicts a choreography on Huangshan the Yellow Mountain in China. The mount Huang is famous from the old chinese shan shui – mountain-water ink paintings. Still now the landscape gathers people to witness it. The view itself is often covered in clouds, only a peak of a mountain hovering in the sight. Still a thousand photos are taken there daily. People pose for photos infront of the landscape. The rythm of gestures done by the visitors, the reaching out, pointing, holding the air and touching the mountains formulates a choreography for the mountain. Chilean composer Fernando Munizag’s piece Mi última palabra china (My last Chinese word) binds the poses into a broken language, an attemp to get hold of tones and diftongs hidden in the grayscale of the moving clouds. The music is based on discoveries Munizaga made in the field of phonetic analysis of Mandarin language. There is a constant movement, with rather simple materials and gestures. All the harmony of the piece is based on strings’ natural harmonics.

Sara Pathirane’s work deals with the tradition of landscape painting and the problematics of taking a picture. As shooting locations for her videos she uses nature areas known from movies and paintings, shifting between the everyday and the fiction. She works with video, painting and live-installations. Pathirane lives and works in Helsinki. She has studied in the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and Accademia Albertina in Torino. Her works have been shown for example at Taiga-Space, Saint-Petersburg (2016), Colombo Art Biennale (2016) and Kiasma (2010, 2013).