VIDEO REWIND: Beryl Korot

In 1974 I visited Dachau, the site of the former concentration camp. It seemed to me a very strange tourist site: very much cleaned up, tourists strolling thru the site, sometimes murmuring, sometimes playing with their children.

Having learned to weave months before, and interested in the multiple channel genre just developing, a video tapestry of Dachau emerged. The minimum number of threads necessary to bind a cloth is four. Paired channels (l and 3) and (2 and 4), though rhythmically different, formed the interlocking “thread” combinations of image and 1 second blanks as the work proceeded in time. This paired structure takes the viewer on a journey from outside the camp’s walls, passed guard towers, to the barracks and finally to the crematoria.

The blanks interrupt the narrative, allowing the identical images of each pair to appear at slightly different times. In its verbal silence, rigorous formalism and focus on the present, the work must ultimately engage the memory of the viewer to endow it with meaning.