Elodie Pong at Tokyo Wonder Site, Shibuya

The main room contains the installation, Script, Set and Characters which consists of four projections. Two projections show Japanese and Swiss people doing everyday things, such as grocery shopping and getting up in the morning. Another projection displays text-messages from mobile phones: fragments of conversation that you can combine with the images or create your own story from the bits of text. The last projection shows a car driving down a dark road: you can only see the headlights from the car and there’s no indication of where the car is going or where its coming from. It is just movement, travel in unknown space.

Secrets for Sale shows people telling their secrets and selling them to the artist. The secrets for the piece were collected in Lausanne, Switzerland at the Centre d’Arts Scéniques Contemporain/Arsenic, 2001-2002 and in Paris, France at the Centre Culturel Suisse, 2003. One room shows the secrets from Lausanne and another the ones from Paris; together the video is 9 hours long and contains around 300 secrets. There is also a 64 minute version that re-contextualizes the initial, interactive installation. I wondered why the participants wanted to tell them, what drives them? Is it the attention, a chance of getting your five minutes of fame? Or perhaps the art-sphere provides a kind of non-reality in which it is safe to speak?

Both works center on intimacy: you are invited to watch peoples’ everyday lives, read parts of their conversations and listen to their secrets. You get a really close and intense look, but this “look” emphasizes your position as a voyeur and creates a distance between yourself and the people in the videos that makes you conscious of your position as a spectator.

Even though the videos have a similar subject matter, the form of the works is very different. Secrets for Sale is not open for interaction, the form is closed; Script, Set and Characters on the other hand has an open form, where the artist provides a framework or some basic fragments and it is up to the spectator to create their own narration. There is no prescribed, linear reading of the work; you have to create your own understanding and relations between the images and the text. Script, Set and Characters makes me think of Umberto Eco’s essay “The Poetics of the Open Work” and his conception of open structure. Pong’s work provides the spectator with the kind of open structure that Eco describes, in which you are free to find your own way through the work. It’s not a question of multiple ways of interpretation, but rather the endless structural possibilities that exist within the work and the fact that the spectator/interpreter has to complete the work alone, by engaging with the work.

This is definitely a must-see exhibition. I’ve only mentioned two of the works in the show, but there is a lot more to experience and interact with. It’s on for another week, so hurry up!