For ‘Time Out New York’ Magazine
Diana Thater has spent the last year learning all she can about chess and falconry, but don’t expect her latest video installations to provide much edification on either topic. Thater doesn’t seem interested in educating her audience about these ancient pastimes, leaving the viewer frustrated as well as tantalized.
Unlike the participants in a dog show, raptors don’t take too kindly to competition, so the set-up of the exhibition’s most engaging video, Horus, is immediately puzzling. As Thater’s camera swoops overhead on a crane, falconers of different ages and sexes sit with their birds in an atmospheric ampitheatre as if waiting to go on. Nobody goes anywhere, however, which only makes you wonder what all the medieval-looking hoods, straps and other equipment used to calm the birds say about the piece’s apparent subject – the relationship between falcon and handler.
Likewise, Thater promises stories without really telling any in a series of individually titled video reenactments of legendary chess matches. In Gary Kasparov vs Deep Junior, for example, we see the legendary Russian grand master pitted against a computer, a contest which certainly offers fertile symbolic possibilities. But absent the gallery’s explanatory handout, it looks just like the other videos in this group, all of which show similar scenes of hands moving pieces on a board. Even so, Thater’s work, beautiful as it is, inspires at least an appreciation for her subjects (her players move their fingers with the poise of dancers). It may entice you to find out more.
