Paris’s Palais de Tokyo is currently showing an impressive new installation by the New York-based Danish artist Jesper Just. Titled “Servitudes,” the installation comprises multiple videos, music, and a spatial intervention.Situated in the lower gallery at Palais de Tokyo, the centerpiece of the installation is a nine-clip film set in and around the equally iconic and controversial One World Trade Center that Just says is emblematic of the political and the spiritual.“There is the sense of absence and loss, a phantom limb, with its sleek aesthetic and imposing stature. Its presence somehow seems inorganic even among the other steel structures, a fake limb in an altered skyline,” Just explains.The film explores the body’s relationship to public and private space and the limits and boundaries of the body itself in a search for selfhood, following the movements of two young female characters through the realm of urban spaceThe first character is a child, her fingers exhibiting a physical disability; the other, a young woman, or “girl,” embodies the idealization/fetishization of youth and femininity that have come together as a hybrid of the model citizen and the “able-bodied.”In one film the disabled child is mirrored in the windows at the foot of the One World Trade Center, playfully looking at her movements as she taps a small rock against the facade of the building creating a rhythmic sound.In another the young girl is eating corn while wearing some sort of range-limiting machine on each of her hands that makes eating difficult. While she is overly focused on the corn she momentarily looks into the camera to engage in a sort of flirtation; but one marked by ambiguity, disconnected and nearly autistic. “The result is both introspective and provocative at once,” says Just.“Each film, looping seamlessly, is both individual and interconnected,” Just said. “I wanted to explore the autonomy of these characters as well – how they define the limits between their bodies and their surroundings, both physically and internally.”Just has also altered the physicality of the space by obstructing all the staircases with structures that on one hand look like scaffolding but at the same time function as wheelchair ramps, raising “questions surrounding ableism and agency as well as the boundaries of body and selfhood.”The music in the installation serves as structural elements and vessels for connection, linking the characters, films, and the experience for the viewers like an invisible web. Just says that he turned to an idea of feedback and resonance as a model for how the individual films relate to one another.“The music is used within the films to establish distance and within the physical exhibition space it serves to establish connection between the visitors and the films. The music also serves as a narrative where there may otherwise be no explicit plot or transparent course of action.”
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