Moving image, 00:14:40, 2020
Filmed, written, edited: Iona Roisin
Hydrophone recordings: Daniel Clark
Compliance is a poetic examination of how trauma reverberates through the years. A voice speaks, sometimes sings, sometimes fails to say. It is trying to address the points at which various confusions meet and link, in an articulated chain, or a ripple. When a discussion of trauma isn’t centred on its origin, the aftermath can play out. Here, the water facilitates a looking across time, mirrors and windows, as well as gaps and blank spots. A sort of portal, upon which bodily evidence materialises. The voice is sense-making, it maps and unpicks, it looks to teenagers, to suburbia, to middle England, to queer futures, to healing.
Thank you to Aino, Elisa, Kaino and Shia for feedback on versions of this work.
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Iona Roisin (b.1989) is a British artist based in Helsinki. Working across moving image and text, her practice is interested in difficulty, intimacy, failure and the insufficiency of language.
Roisin’s video works have been screened in London, Helsinki, Zagreb, Seoul, Leiden, Brest, St. Petersburg and Tallinn. Her writing is published or forthcoming in Fourteen Poems (UK), Astra (FI), Zelda Mag (FI).