Camille Henrot at Art Sonje Center

Filmed in New York, Washington, DC, Tahiti, and Tonga, her video Saturday (2017) focuses on the Seventh Day Adventist Church (SDA), an evangelical millenarian Christian denomination that celebrates the Sabbath and practices baptism rituals on Saturday. Shot mostly in 3D, the film combines images of baptism rituals recorded by Henrot at SDA Church with neurological testing, a food commercial, a Botox injection, high-wave surfing, an endoscopy, and civil demonstrations. This amalgam of imagery highlights connections between different human strategies to maintain hope in medical, religious, and political dimensions. The worldwide scope of the SDA Church’s mission is being altered as different contexts generate exceptions to their principles. Separated from the main SDA centers by the International Date Line, for example, Adventists in the Kingdom of Tonga instead observe the Sabbath on Sunday so as to celebrate in unison with the rest of the community. This particular detail also highlights the long relationship between religion and globalization that is further typified by the Church’s mimicry of news corporations seen in the film. The Hope Channel is one of some ten SDA channels broadcasting God’s good news, while the headlines that scroll along the bottom of the screen in Saturday relate upheaval and disaster. This contrast underlines what Joyce called the “digestive value of religion”.

The word “Tuesday” has its origins in Tyr, the Norse god of war and victory. Tuesday (2017) is a body of work combining video and sculpture that refers to both ancient mythology and the phenomenon of contemporary motivational messaging, as seen through the hashtag “#transformationtuesday”, for example. The film interweaves images of racehorses running, breathing, and having their hair groomed with others showing jiu jitsu practitioners in slow motion as they train on mats before a match. Tuesday subverts competition and replaces it with passive contemplation and an exaggerated suspension of movement and action. Installed along with the video are two sculptures that represent the body in an entangled form. They blur the lines between the acts of surrender and control.

The exhibition Saturday, Tuesday examines the forms of behavior and emotion that make up our existence, twisting the dualistic power structure and relationship to authority as we perceive it as individuals or communities. Henrot builds a space of possibilities protected from the binary dynamic and the irreversibility operating in our daily life, where the question of who wins or who loses becomes irrelevant.