Artist: Brice Dellsperger
Title: Body Double 34
Curated by: Federico Acal and Benny Van den Meulengracht-Vrancx
Screening: February 20 – March 18, 2018
Year: 2017
Duration: 5’05”
Body Double 34 is a three-channel video installation of reenactments of a scene central to the narrative of American director Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. For his re-creation, Brice Dellsperger filmed 14 acting students, male and female, as they performed the significant dialogue of the cover boys scene in a Sex Shop in Portland.
Dellsperger’s Body Double series investigates the transformative possibilities of reproducing films. Marie Canet, in her essay on Dellsperger’s work, writes that “against standardization, but also primarily because of it, the banality of cinematographic representation, the disenchanted known, and ‘already seen’ become, through remodeling, an opportunity and the means for a new body of work.” A tremendously variegated methodology manifests itself throughout the Body Double series. Dellsperger has recreated canonical sequences from the oeuvres of DePalma, Kubrick or Lynch, but he has also recreated films in their entirety. He has sometimes respected the chronology of the original, keeping everything from the plotlines to the audio tracks intact, in other cases he has re-arranged scenes and altered the sound of the original. Dellsperger’s videos are sometimes fashioned as heartfelt amateur productions shown modestly on simple monitors but are frequently— as is the case here — adventuresome, ambitious, fully enveloping multiple-channel projections.
