This work used a pair of slide projectors onto a large wall in a pitch black room - the images overlapped at times, followed a slow rhythmic sequence, with scans of text, amalgamation of images and extracts of plot, set to booming jazz music. The filmic references and reverting to solid red projection every few clips made the installation very dramatic.
"Images without text construct the world described in the tape/slide work The Mysteries of Berlin (1979-82) by Cordelia Swann. It was inspired by The Mysteries of Udolpho, written by Ann Radcliffe in 1794, in which the heroine is kidnapped by the Pyrenees and transported to Venice - both places that the writer never visited. We experience a barrage of projected images accompanied by surging music. THese photographs, shown in the ir entirety and in close up, seem to describe a dramatic world full of shadows, threat and romance. This is a representation of Berlin, shaped by thrillers and film noir. Much of Berlin itself was inaccessible and hidden behind the wall and it took on a strange charge of attraction, threatening and strangely erotic, as something denied by the dominant political narratives of the West. None of the images used by the artist are in fact of Berlin but were chosen from magazines books and films for their closeness to how she imagined this alien zone."
http://www.metropolism.com/reviews/three-exhibitions-in-london/
