THE BLINDING LIGHT

of FATMI Mounir

FRANCE, 2016, 00:12:00

Production : STUDIO FATMI
Genre : Video art
Keyword : Allegory, Religion, science

Summary :
Blinding Light is a black-and-white, 11 minutes and 57 seconds long video made of several superimposed images. The backdrop is a painting by Fra Angelico entitled, The Healing of the Deacon Justinian, onto which several photographs and videos from a contemporary surgical unit were merged.

This tempera on wood painting by Fra Angelico is from one of the scenes on the predella of the altarpiece of Saint Mark dating from 1440 and located in the National Museum San Marco in Florence. The work traces different miracles of two saints, Como and Damian. In this scene, the brothers of Arab origin realize a posthumous miracle with the graft of the leg of an Ethiopian Moor who had just been buried in the cemetery of St. Peter of the deacon. The episode evokes the interbreeding of a white body with a black body member, that of a living and of a dead person, by finally questioning the notion of race and the hybridization of identity. In the contemporary photographs from the operating room, where technology and sterilization are foremost, the doctors rub shoulders with the two saints forming a single working group. Thus, the ghosts and the living present another form of reality, a fantasized temporality which is just as miraculous as the religious text.

Overarching this idea of ​​hybridization, in this video mounir fatmi operates a skillful game by marrying the Renaissance to hypermodernity. This temporal ellipse, superimposing the two space-times, renders the technology and the anesthesia divine, much as a miracle was held as divine. The characters in the picture then become ghosts. This gap forces the viewer to operate a mental back and forth between the two eras. Thus, the superimposition of the times emphasizes the idea that a religious miracle is nowadays entirely feasible.

mounir fatmi thus tries to cross unexpectedly two spheres of beliefs often seen as antagonists. On the one hand, that of science, order, and reason; And on the other hand, that of religion, with its reliance on faith, miracle and the sacred.


Studio Fatmi, December 2016.
Translation Kate Huddlestone, pour Heure Exquise !

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