The shaping of landscape is the anchor of English artist Rachel Reupke’s oeuvre, in line with traditional photography or pictorial representation. Caspar David Friedrich and Andreas Gursky are essential influences. Reupke’s works are made up of static shots and panoramas manipulated and organized using the computer, with which she introduces a narrative rhythm and invented elements.

Did an error slip into the image? Now Wait for Last Year successively unreels three static shots of the city of Beijing: a large urban junction, an ensemble of show-flats and a conglomerate of buildings with a tunnel cutting through. Each of these views assumes an artificial character, in their acid skies as much as in their occupants with neither aim nor face; three edifying images of a modern city where life seems good. Each view is shown for a long time. The spectator thus readily examines and questions the images. By turns the images uncover effect, dupery, movement and figures; oscillations between the animated foreground and the static middle ground, between the tension of the visible and invisible, between kitsch Maoist aesthetics and science fiction’s catastrophist sketch. Like the painter or the photographer, the videographer claims to be fascinated by the constraint imposed by the creation of a work concluded in a single image, as well as by the narration of the totality of an action or a story within one frame.

Shot on a residence in Beijing, during the major works of the 2008 Olympic Games, the artist was inspired by this city going through a violent architectural boom and its capacity to anticipate its urban history. This video parodies the commercial clichés served up to the Chinese population and the rest of the world. Reupke says that she was interested in the public front of this development: the urbanism exhibitions, the show-flats, the billboards, the illustrations of construction projects and the slogans on the standard of living at every street corner. Beijing and Shanghai are cities which embellish their future with promotional banners, as has been the case with other large cities of a Dionysiac urban development such as Dubai or Abu Dhabi, whose museums mark their consecration. Usually Reupke takes special care in adding sound to her videos, but this work is silent in order to reinforce the impression of a postcard.

Now Wait for Last Year is also the title of a metaphysical science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick about an alternative time. Reupke, who is particularly intrigued by science fiction, here delights in leading on the spectator in disconcerting back-and-forths between the perceptible and the imperceptible, between mobility and fixity. Beijing represents the ideal protagonist, a city where each junction exhibits and anticipates its future in a poster or a video. Are we visualising a present, a time to come, or a future – or would that be already in the past? Where did this postcard come from? When was it sent?

Florence Parot

Translated by Yin Ker