The rupturing of personal spaces

ARTWALK

IF THERE IS one thing Magnus Wallin and the fashion ramp have in common, it is the looping "" both of the movement and of the audience's emotions. Sit down for a fashion show and you'll spend the next few hours watching models stream in and out, familiar faces and new clothing.

It's as much of a loop as Magnus Wallin's perfectly muscled humanoids performing on tracks and in corridors, repeatedly, in his video art. At the end of each frame, you are a little more on edge, the tension mounting because you can sense a revelation coming up in the next frame. What will it be? In the Hirschhorn's exciting new multi-media show, Swedish Magnus Wallin's video works burst with palpable tension and rhythm.

Magnus works in the twilight spaces between sleep and awakening "" when people are more receptive to the bizarre, their fragility less guarded. The works on display here "" "Exercise Parade" and "Anatomic Flop" "" both find their origins in many of our nightmare "types".

There is repeated effort, movement, fright and near death, kind of. This is stressful enough to watch. When the finale seems to be approaching, it is almost as if Magnus is telling you a story, and it's time for the terror of it to strike. In one glance, Max Ernst mixes with Phantom.

The first video is about over-muscular runners, who are repeatedly and inexplicably thrown back violently to the starting point. Each time, Magnus lets you see a little closer to their end point, the suspense getting sharpened.

Slowly, two giant flapping shadows appear. It becomes a horrible winged avian nightmare, the winds from each flapping movement creating a gust that shoots them back. There is no winning here. But no stopping either.

The other video unfolds in a long, fluorescent light lit corridor, something out of a sad motel. A skeletal system and muscular system, both well defined, frog leap over each other with the fluid ease of ballet dancers.

Every now and then a giant crystal ball, pregnant with a human figure, rolls through the corridor, almost crushing the two companions. They are saved as they cling to the walls, resuming frog leaping amidst groaning and grief. Their end is startling, but it's not certain whether or not they've been claimed by the creature.

Unlike many video games, on which Magnus bases his "feel", he retains the sheer detail and beauty of each body within the frame. This is only to be expected given that Magnus claims he is inspired directly by Vesalius's fourteenth century rendering of the human body.

Using the classical image of the human body with a reengineered one refers, visually, to contemporary uncertainty and loss of individual control. You're placed in a GM kind of world where the very smallest parts of life have lost autonomy. Using the body in this uneasy way creates the point of departure with the ramp too: there is no comfortable supermodel in Magnus's worldview, despite the space in his work for gawking.

At some level, these works reflect the rupturing of personal and seemingly enclosed spaces by giant, frustrating forces that are hard to see and define. Through film, a medium that connects ideas from one person to another, Magnus has, in contradiction, created an allegory for loneliness and vulnerability.