As Long as You Love Me - George Paton Gallery

Though Bec has covered it before, and I live less than a kilometre away, I had never been to George Paton Gallery before this week. The UMSU Gallery was a trove of artistic potential, but perhaps none more so than As Long As You Love Me, the video installation work by Alanna Baxter, Lara Oluklu and Naimo Omar. I couldn’t tell you how long the loop is, as I was so engrossed, walking back and forth between the three screens so as to not miss anything, that I didn’t think to note the timing. Simple on a surface level – three screens, a dark curtain, white text on black cutting between film snippets – Baxter, Oluklu, and Omar have made something totally their own out of an entirely borrowed script. 

The accompanying gallery text spans eight pages, comprising the whole script of the work alongside the footnotes and introductory texts. 

“The show is structured around one mimetic act, a sequence of (re)iteration. Image, feeling, sound, self, audience and lamentation represent where public and private transform (perhaps dissolve) the personal and impersonal.”

Despite being heavily researched and well introduced in the texts, they are not paramount to the work. The work is itself a test of your cultural references, artistic knowledge, theory, and media consumption. The works I identified sans footnotes are not what you would pick up, and vice versa. The result is a singular experience. I felt like I was bearing witness to the Moirai deciding fates. The presentation of the written text without context abstracted the words from their origins. Lyrics, prose, poetry, and criticism came together to create the only work that has left me wanting to both reread Beloved and listen to Justin Bieber. Baxter, Oluklu, and Omar might be some of the most expansively read artists I’ve covered recently, if their footnotes are anything to go by. Far and away the most impressive part of the work is how distinct each of their voices were. You knew who was talking, not just through the use of different screens, but in the references, the knowledge, the interpretations. The one thing I cannot tell you though is who is spinning, who is measuring, and who is cutting the strings of life. That is for them to know.

As Long As You Love Me is on at George Paton Gallery until April 24.