Meeting Point is a performative video, made by Croatian artist Sanja Ivekovic in the mid-seventies. From the outset, the first shot of the tape installs the elements of the conceptual framework that will be used during the performance: a monitor is switched on (but on standby, without representation, showing only digital snow) and there is a tape recorder, placed on a pedestal, along with an empty chair turned towards the monitor, which the artist comes to sit on with her back to us, to draw with a black marker pen on the centre of the screen. Once this has been set up, the camera centres the image on the monitor, reducing the space of the performance to the single screen, while we hear the artist activate the video player in the off-screen space.

The characteristic noise of activation is essential, both through its powerful evocation a posteriori – as a sound of its era – but above all because it indicates that, beyond the frame, the artist is controlling the machine and the performative process that will take place onscreen. The triggered performance begins with the broadcast of a video on the monitor, deliberately disrupted by freeze frames, the outcome of which we only learn progressively. This recording represents the artist herself, dancing in an uplifting way to the sound of hard-rock music, shot in close up, very close to the face. Her gaze is intermittently turned towards the lens of the camera – towards the spectator – allowing the black dot drawn in the middle of her forehead to be seen.

The whole objective of the tape, and of this performance between artist and machine, is to cause the two black dots to coincide – the one found in the image, drawn on the artist's forehead, and the one drawn on the centre of the screen. It is therefore a matter for the artist of manoeuvring between the static nature of the monitor and the temporality of her own representation, of mastering the progression of time by way of the machine – particularly through the use of slow motion – in order to achieve her purpose. Clearly, here, a reappropriation of the common use of the monitor and video player is at work. The temporal logic and flow of the sequence of the video is interrupted, the image and sound are constantly disrupted and suspended so that the artist may attain her goal.

But beyond the playful principle of causing two images to coincide – a “video” game, we might say – it is a question here of signifying several distinct temporalities. Two different times have effectively been brought into collision: the time of the recording, inherently in the past tense, re/presented and reactivated by the machine; and the time of the action, in which the artist activates the video player and the recorded time. A third time can also be considered – that of the artwork Meeting Point itself – the sum of the first two tenses and the result of their recording, a temporal mise en abyme on a magnetic tape.

Etienne Sandrin