PASSAGE I (Schiff), 1998
1-channel video installation, 3:09 min. loop, colour, silent, monitor 28“
On the open sea: seen from a moving boat, a container ship floating parallel to the horizon comes slowly into view, only to disappear again just as slowly at the right-hand side of the image. This sequence is repeated again and again, so that the occurrence appears increasingly surreal. It is difficult for the observer to notice that the perspective is based on a movement in itself: the recording on which the video is based was made during the process of overtaking. PASSAGE I is the first in a complex of works in which Baranowsky is concerned with the relative nature of movement. Where are we moving to, and can we possibly know this while we are doing it?

PASSAGE II (Zug), 1998
2-channel video installation, 0:16 min. loop, colour, silent, two monitors 28“
Two monitors installed either beside or above each other show the same video, running forwards in one case and backwards in the other: from the last carriage of a train, Baranowsky recorded the train’s movement around a bend. The short recording lasting only 16 seconds has been cut and edited to create an endless loop. The viewer’s intuitive sense of orientation is utterly shaken. She gets the impression that she is travelling through a never-ending bend.

PASSAGE III (Bahnhof), 1998
1-channel video installation, 1:09 min. loop, colour, silent, monitor 28“
The third Passages work is based on a sequence of 70 seconds that was filmed from an accelerating train as it left the departures hall of Berlin’s Zoo Station. Station signs, kiosks and travellers standing on the platform enter our field of vision and turn increasingly into an amorphous mass. The work adopts the movement of a pendulum: in a loop the video is mirrored and played backwards, so that the train seems to slow down again, never to leave the station.

Daniel Schreiber