With All That Passes Before You, Already In Ruin, Jordan Biren brings a performative incursion to his long-standing ordeal in video. Through live recitation of text the physicality of words is loosed upon an intimate expanse of high-definition imagery and sound. A rich, temporal presence ensues of transient landscapes, time, and characters advancing as spectres in the shadows of glistening cinematic moments. Words—displaced from the image—move as ghostly figures through the illusory promise of narrative towards a question of alterity. In his ongoing performances of All That Passes Before You, Already In Ruin, Biren abandons suggestions of cinematic sense for a resonance carried on the frequency of bodily words.
The 1st in a new series of (Mobile geography performances) "All That Passes Before You, Already In Ruin" will be performed live at Parsons Hall Project Space, Thursday May 20th - 8pm (free)
Is an artist for whom video is the poetic rehearsal of his artistic endeavor.
His work has long pondered meaning as a migration behind the illusory promise of narrative utterance. His is work of a melancholic tension built around narrative dissolutions in the chasms of granular image, text, and sound. Narrative, rather, has inhered in his video as a vaporous impossibility against which the work is directed. He seeks in this the more enigmatic holes of unexplained human experience—those breaches covered over, as if unsightly, by the image, sound, and textual impulses of an arbitrary existence. Of late, his work has approached an equivalence of film aesthetic against which notions of video define a new, hybrid form of narrative province.
