Empty the Pond to Get the Fish

A short film reveals the rigorous and poetic language of Runa Islam, one of the best-known artists in the world of moving images. She uses the medium of cinema, its technique and essential grammar, to call attention to visual representation. Her works draw from the imagery of great cinema classics, concentrating on minimal fragments, moving on the hesitations and introspections of slow motion. In Empty the Pond To Get the Fish (2008), the camera’s eye lingers on abstract frames. Initially, the close-ups produce an apparently meaningless image, then the camera slowly widens the shot, through shifts in the vertical and horizontal, to reveal first an empty auditorium, then a museum where workers are installing a painting. The sense of expectation and the revelation of the work is an integrating part of this film’s final logic. The artist utilizes the mechanical subjectivity of the TV camera’s eye to evoke the human gaze, subverting the cinematic tradition based on narrative story.