In his films, live video connections, and kinetic sculptures, Darren Almond investigates the themes of time, space, and endurance. Growing up in the working-class town of Wigan, near Manchester in northern England, the artist spent much of his leisure time as a train-spotter; this enthusiasm has motivated his exploration of time structures and transportation systems––clocks and trains appear often in his work. Not unlike the physicist Albert Einstein, who coincidentally used the example of a clock on a train to explain the space-time continuum, Almond explores the ways in which these seemingly fixed factors are in fact reciprocal and relative.
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The first of a trilogy of short films based on trains, Schwebebahn features one of the oldest, most unusual, and still notably efficient public transportation systems in the world: the suspended monorail system in Wuppertal, Germany, built between 1898 and 1901. Using a handheld Super 8 camera and shooting from several vantage points within the train cars, Almond produced footage that was, as Martin Herbert described it, “Inverted, reversed, and retarded . . . so that the train appeared to be above the rail and the landscape below appeared to be above and upside-down. In slow-motion, the experience of riding the rails. . . became a kind of suspended animation in a parallel universe.” In Almond’s disorienting world, the viewer’s experience of gravity and perception is unbalanced: the horizon is misleading, and time and movement are cyclical, reversed. This defamiliarizing sensation is further heightened by a soundtrack of hypnotic electronic music.
The two other films in the trilogy are Geisterbahn, or Ghost Train (1999), which documents a shadowy ride through a haunted house in Vienna that was rebuilt after World War II, and In the Between (2006), a three-screen projective installation that follows the recently opened railway from Xining, China, to Lhasa, Tibet, with symbolic vignettes from each of the once completely isolated areas. Throughout his oeuvre, Almond acknowledges the passing of time and its inevitable consequences, whatever they may be. Without judgment, he creates poetic comparisons between our analog past and the increasing speed of the digital age.
