Tim White - "CONFESSION"

Press release

Current video project "Confession" is a 4-channel installation. Abstract and fictious, this project is built on real and imaginary action.

The centerpiece of it is a young girl placing herself in different historical and geographical environments, traveling in her mind through different mise en scene. She seems to meditate in the face of nature about life and death, faith and disbelief. She dives into the imaginary world of her own, in the world of memories inherited from stories told by her forefathers.


The water and the girl's meditation relate to the inter-connection between the past and the future as diving and coming out of the water present the link between reality and mind games. She is communicating with physical and emotional environment on the instinctive and personal level; everything matters in this conversion - where she belonged geographically and historically and where her ancestors came from. She presents her moral achievements through a highly nuanced confession of her soul. Confession as subject of study is necessary for humans to understand themselves. If confession does not serve to discover truth it will, at the least, teach her fundamental rules of life.

 For the artist, there is a possibility of studying a pure event, no longer manipulated or interpreted by any historical subjectivity. Any shallow interpretation of day-to-day confession pronounced to herself would empty the girl's words she had perceived in their deepest and most precious meaning. The beauty of the past being that "history survives its disappearance" (Jean Baudrillard). The little girl reveals a phenomenon of confession when it is about to disappear in the alloy of reality and mind games. Some of us might speculate on the significance of encouraging the confessional mode. Ours is a confessional age.

The girl dives in and out of the cleansing waters, switching from reality to dreams, wakening from deep thoughts and falling back into meditation on confession. Does she need a confession or does she encourage us to confess? She is only a small particle of the world history, an example of all us. We carry all the guilt for the wrongdoing in the world. No one needs to experience sin in order to fill the need to confess, - this knowledge is independent of experience and even of all impressions of the senses. "Such knowledge is entitled a priori, and distinguished from the empirical, which has its sources a posteriori, that is, in experience." (Immanuel Kant, "Critique of Pure Reason")