Simone Hine: Corridor (2009): A world between screens

We haunt and are haunted by spaces. A woman walks purposefully through the halls and stairwells of Melbourne’s Nicholas Building. While the era of the art-deco architecture is echoed in the woman’s attire, the black and white film further situates the work in an imagined past well before the film was shot. For Hine, her medium is spectral, able to project visions of the past into spaces where they once took place, or maybe never happened.

A kind of echo runs through the work, ricocheting off the tiled walls and concrete floors. The sound of brisk footsteps bounces discordantly off shots of empty halls, only to find its source in the parallel image of the other screen. There are prolonged sequences of silence, when the echo is purely architectural. The same stairwell, the same windows, albeit observed, maybe, from a different angle.

The architectural logic of the work is complicated. At times the woman walks from one screen to the other, or appears simultaneously on both screens, waiting and walking away. She may have already walked the same hall a dozen times, we may be watching a replay or a re-enactment, but the divided screens allow the camera to linger on empty spaces and familiar corridors concurrently. The dual composition renders each sequence anew, though not without a lingering sense that we may have been here before.

The void between the screens becomes a site where logic fails and a new dialogue of difference and repetition is formed. It is a space of immateriality through which we must venture so as to make sense of the images we see, and in doing so we invest a place of transience with a sense of purpose. Elyssia Bugg