During a residential stay at the C-space gallery in Beijing, the Dutch media-artist Peter Bogers has made daily video-recordings at just one local crossroad in Chaochangdi, Beijing.  The language-barrier in mind, Bogers has used his camera as a tool to communicate. He simply put it on a tripod and stood next to it for hours, using this situation to get in contact with people passing by. The resulting recordings form the basis for a comprehensive audiovisual installation presented in the C-Space gallery, situated in the heart of Caochangdi. 

All footage has been edited into a breathing rhythm of repeatedly playing forward and backward in time. It offers the viewer the possibility to closely study gradually developing daily situations and inevitably confronts him with the idea that it is the element of time that bounds all movement and human action together.  Time as a huge invisible network of strings, inextricably connecting all matter, all physical objects and all human bodies.

In 'scanning Caochangdi-Caochangdi scanning' all is tied to an overarching rigid time structure, claustrophobic because of its inevitability, but simultaneously opening up an intense world off appealing small events and their mysterious interdependencies.

*image (left)
© David Bogers
courtesy of the artist and C-Space