Emotion Rules Alone by Lucille Groos

A Piano Played By Ear

Curated by Paola Paleari

August 2 –30

Lucille Groos

Emotion Rules Alone, 2022

HD video and sound, single screen, 8:25 min

An orchestra of electrical outlets, a dead fly that is swept around construction sites and a young mother who climbs a crane while carrying her baby and threatens to jump if not given an affordable home before nightfall. Lucille Groos’ début video poetically comments on how the neoliberalist system chooses profit before people and how this tyranny undermines the intuitive purpose of being alive.

The work is Groos’ interpretation of the true story told by Helke Sander in the 1985 social-realist film From the Reports of Security Guards & Patrol Services No. 1, while the title is borrowed from a poem in the 1998 science fiction book Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler, set against the backdrop of a dystopian 21st-century United States led by violence, racism and greed.

Through a series of moving pictures, the video highlights the absurdity of a world that seeks progress for progress’s sake, and how quick solutions aimed at profit are mirrored by quick solutions made in desperation to survive.

Camera: Lucille Groos
Cast: Melanie Kitti & Ludvig-Lulu Brostrup
Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Jean-Michel Defaye (extracts from the soundtrack of the movie Le Bonheur (“Happiness”) by Agnès Varda, 1965)

Lucille Groos (b. 1999) is currently enrolled in the MFA at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.

Paola Paleari (b. 1984) is an Italian independent writer, editor and curator based in Copenhagen. She co-curated the Contemporary Art Program 2021-2022 at Vestjyllands Kunstpavillon and has directed the exhibition platform JIR SANDEL since 2018. She writes extensively about contemporary art and between 2013 and 2018 she covered the position of Deputy Editor at YET magazine. Her main area of interest is the photographic language and its relations with contemporary visual culture and art practices. She is also interested in the intersection between critical and creative writing and often intertwines art criticism with other forms of storytelling.

Lucille Groos, Emotion Rules Alone, 2022, HD video and sound, single screen, 8:25 min