Gary Hill was able to work in Japan, thanks to a grant. URA ARU is the trace of this confrontation with oriental culture. The artist really owed it to himself to go to a country where no differentiation was made between signs and objects, between representation and the world – for every element of substance is a sign and every sign conceals another sign.

Gary Hill's thought-process is close to the Japanese conception of signs. InURA ARU (Ura: back to front, Aru: existence), Gary Hill reflects on the different sorts of palindromes and their interaction with twin images – mirrors, the right way and back-to-front, symmetry. A written palindrome is an expression you can read back-to-front: an acoustic palindrome is an expression that can be pronounced back-to-front (for example Asu, tomorrow, in the coming days, becomes Usa, melancholy; it is both a written and an acoustic palindrome). Gary Hill's palindromes change in meaning with the direction in which they are read. The sign is reversible, but not symmetrical. It is two words in one.

Here, the Western pre-eminence given over to the meaning embedded in a shape is attacked from the inside. Meaning surges as the sign evolves in the direction chosen for its meaning to be conveyed. This implies that the problem of meaning is already related to notions of space, time and evolution. And this is what Gary Hill's video imagery demonstrates with the incrustation, reverse action and movement of text on the screen. The text is alive. What is said is not Logos, a manner of making a statement about the world, it is rather a revelation of the world itself. So life becomes a mysterious expedient girdled in sacred magic. Nô rituals, masks, the ceremonial dimension of gestures – and URA ARU images bear us towards an entanglement of texts to be unravelled.

Gary Hill achieves the 'back to front' phenomenon with videographic trick effects. In a continuous stream, the same audio-visual fragment is projected the right way round and then back-to-front: whilst the image and the spoken word are unusual when projected back-to-front, the spoken word, on the other hand, continues to evidence the meaning normally (the meaning of the word in reverse); whereas at the outset, image and sound are spontaneously linked together, the back-to-front phenomenon extricates the image from the spoken word, manifests the separation and autonomy of each element. In Japanese culture, the consistency of a sign is never absolute and, in Hill's universe, this is in constant permutation.

Paul-Emmanuel Odin