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Johanna Billing Text by Lisa Panting for "Untitled as yet", Yugoslav Biennale of young artists Belgrade & Vrsac, Serbia & Montenegro, 2004 In Project for a Revolution and You Donšt Love me Yet two forms of group event are staged. On the one hand, a verbal silence prevails whilst in the other, a sound track is performed, the song "You Donšt Love me Yet". These two videos address group behaviour, not group behaviour as direct action, more the subtle nuances that exist within the social codes that permeate any collection of people. Billing examines the subject of group belonging and the way in which glances and body movements can signify an individual's relationship to the social whole. The videos are peppered with a sensibility that is restrained, perhaps indicative of their place of origin and of the demeanour of youth in general. This restraint confers an atmosphere that is also constructed by the composition of images in Project for a Revolution, where the event has been reduced to the bodily mechanics of communication that precede the act of speech. The spectacle of an assembled group in You Donšt Love me Yet is muffled by the work's setting in a recording studio. This is a place where the notion of performance has a peculiar resonance through a perceived lack of audience and the sense that this is a take, a moment incurred during the act of recording. What both works have in common is a strange dislocation of the viewer. By excluding the position of the audience we enter into a place where our temporality is suspended ­ the cut through events makes the unpicking of time scales difficult. What is the relationship between listening to "You Donšt love me Yet" on headphones and the recording studio? Does the protagonist in Project bring anything to bear in this scenario? Are we looking at imagined doubling, where the self becomes transported to another place, a place of action and affect away from a sense of stasis? The formal cues that exist in Billing's practice are often taken from great cinema directors. Project for a Revolution nods to Antonioni whilst You Donšt Love me Yet refers to Bo Wideberg. These references occur in the beginning, which if we take this sense of internal doubling a bit further is an interesting fabrication that could be about the imagined space that cinema has historically offered its audiences ­ mirrored by the internal and externalisation of the characters in the work. By combining the languages of cinema and video, Billing is narrowing the gap that exists between these two mediums by bringing them together in reflection on a particular social/local moment. Lisa Panting, 2004 <<<