I N I T I A L S is presented in installation form, with a series of 89 slides projected large-format on the wall. The projector – and we hear the clicking of the carousel moving forward in the machine – is situated in the room. On the screen, in the same abandoned hospital setting, we see six characters passing by, three men and three women, whose clothes are like the contemporary tracksuits worn in hospitals and cities. One sole, older character stands out against this ground, wearing a romantic-looking evening suit. This character has a more theatrical look about him than the other characters, although they all seem to be posing ostensibly for the camera. The poses are hieratic and frozen, the bodies move about on the screen from one slide to the next, and the background décor also alters, with the whole thing conjuring up different playlets in a melodrama. We see an X-ray machine, hospital furniture, and other instruments used by the medical profession. The walls show signs of wear and tear. This place is a place of memory which refers to a certain knowledge. Through this décor, Coleman sets his characters in a relationship to history and memory. But no narrative thread emerges from the succession of images, nor even from the text which we hear as voice-overs throughout the projection. A child's voice pronounces the letters of the alphabet, while other voices utter sentences in which we successively find philosophical and poetic statements, as well as references to popular language, like the language used in television programmes, science-fiction and serials, and references to Irish culture, of which Coleman is the offspring. These statements remain allusive and elude any closure of meaning. By presenting several layers of at once visual and auditory references, Coleman challenges the meaning of the image and our ability to decipher it. This work is a well-rounded reflection about representation and the photographic medium. It challenges reproducibility and the technical nature at the heart of photography, in relation to the historicity of the Western logos. Coleman emphasizes the conditions of image production: some commentaries deal with this. The march past of shots resembles a rehearsal while actors try out different positions and change places. The look in their eyes is expressionless, as neutral as can be, and on the whole they stare at the camera. The narrative is suspended. A gaping quality emanates from the images, where, despite the bits and pieces of meanings giving the impression of some kind of drama unfolding, we remain in the dark about the event as such. The spectator is summoned for better or for worse to assimilate these visual and acoustic bits and pieces suggesting ideas and situations. The spectator has to live with the sensation that he is completely failing with regard to what is being presented to him and offered to his ear. Any elucidation of the meaning sideslips beneath the succession of images which, while bringing new presentational factors to each change of slides – the arrival and departure of certain characters, the presence and disappearance of props – never lead to a conclusive scene or an apparently logical unfolding of events. In their differences, the images are displayed to the spectator's eye (and his ear) like so many facets of one and the same diamond. They reflect ideas and emotions in several directions at once. So the spectator is summoned to focus on a gap in the image, its interstices, and those of representation in general. The narrative is deconstructed before the audience's very eyes, as is the custom in the history of representation in the West, from palaeolithic painting to the bulimic machine of today's media. Today's culture is a culture of the image, pushed to its uttermost limit. I N I T I A L S addresses this inflation of the image and meaning in the analytic mode. The piece presents no solutions, it merely focuses on the mechanisms for producing meaning which are our current mechanisms, by dissecting the various acoustic and visual factors.

I N I T I A L S begins at the beginning, as the work's title suggests. This title refers as much to the idea of beginnings (plural), including the alphabet as the basis of language and knowledge, as to the acronyms which nowadays occupy much of our everyday language and our corporate conception of the world. A simplifying line of thought is at work, as illustrated by photography and certain forms of coded language. A work like I N I T I A L S seeks to deconstruct methods of perception, and find a way through the limits of representation. The bodies pose frontally, placed right opposite the spectators. They move about in a space which is being constantly reconfigured in a choreographic manner. The bodies gather together like a choir whose voices rise, so many subjects within a group, all looking for meaning and voice. Coleman here offers us something polyphonic which is played out between generations, between the past, the present and an unknown future. A drama unfolds, but it is not possible to enclose it within a single discursive mode. The space opens up before us viewers, unfurls and then closes up again, with the meanders of our imagination, called upon to work in a performative way. Over and above the stasis of the actors, a possible world beckons, the world of awakening consciousness.

Chantal Pontbriand
Translated by Simon Pleasance