The artist’s film at Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin finds the human condition forever caught between the actual and the imagined
In Approx 1 Second of a Sweet Kiss (2023–24), a five-channel, 13-minute film by Dublin-based artist Lisa Freeman, almost nothing happens. As the romantic title suggests, we are in the realm of barely registered sensation, of fleeting pleasures and possibilities. But Freeman’s emphasis is less on moments of dramatic consequence and sensory fulfilment – the brief, blissful experience of that ‘sweet kiss’ – than on states of everyday longing. Four women – one featured as the central, pensive protagonist – drift through a superficially easeful world, variously sauntering along sunlit streets, drinking coffee on an outdoor terrace, lounging and dancing in an airy apartment. (Men are incidental to the film’s female-centred reveries, figuring only as extras: a waiter, passing pedestrians.) Inside and outside, the tone is insistently soft. From clothing to street furniture to architectural details, Freeman accentuates a palette of gentle pastels: lilac, peach, blush pink, baby blue. On the soundtrack, waves of hypnagogic droning and humming come and go. At times, the camera’s focus blurs, as if someone’s eyes are closing, or just beginning to open. (One of the recurring audio samples is a chopped and screwed snippet of André 3000 crooning “I woke up early this morning…”, taken from the 2003 Kelis track Millionaire.)
Watching these vaporous episodes float across the five monitors of Freeman’s installation (the main action shifts every few minutes from one to another, while slow-motion details replay on the remaining screens as hazy visual echoes), I’m reminded of Irish literary critic Vivian Mercier’s comment that Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) is a two-act play ‘in which nothing happens, twice’. Freeman’s approach leans in a similar direction. Recutting and reformatting an original single-channel cinema version of Approx 1 Second, she amplifies a consciously nondramatic drama – a study of lowkey, languid interactions – into a situation of expanded emptiness, deep-diving into life’s vaguest, most uneventful times and spaces. Yet if there is, still, a sought-after something in Freeman’s film, it’s traceable in that titular allusion to human tenderness. Twice in the film, casual on-street encounters conclude with a warm embrace between apparent strangers: these are curious moments of unforced, quite ordinary kindness, expressions of unselfconscious affection that further heighten the mood of sweetly hypnotic strangeness. What would it mean, Freeman seems to ask, if such intimate acts were routine features of daily life? What would this tilt towards public tenderness do to our sense of social and personal space?
Writing recently about director Celine Song’s beautifully restrained 2023 romance Past Lives, The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane praised the film’s air of ‘cheerfully worried fragility’ while noting too the significance of its ‘flickers of severity’. In cautiously advocating for simple forms of civic compassion, Freeman’s film has some of the former – fast-fading intimations of tension as unprompted gestures of sisterly fondness are risked in public places – but not enough, perhaps, of the latter. Admittedly, the work’s display setup succeeds as a severe physical contrast to the woozy drift of the scenes themselves: individual monitors mounted on sleek, steel poles; a simple aluminium stacking chair in front of each. (Unlike the characters, we must sit up straight rather than lounge around.) But time spent at Temple Bar Gallery, with its grand windows looking out to a generally clamorous Dublin streetscape, offers up a further contrast. That is: between Freeman’s understated and hopeful urban dream-vision, and the multisensory, socially complex conditions of the living city outside. It’s a potentially productive clash. Caught between the imagined and the actual, we might be reminded, yet again, of how much each one needs the other.
Approx 1 Second of a Sweet Kiss at Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, 22 March – 19 May
