Artist’s Statement - Current

Saskia Takens-Milne’s video art presents us with an uncanny, realistic depiction of life in a looking-glass world. The world depicted is the actual world in which we live, the only world we could - perhaps - ever have, the unreal world of ideology. Takens-Milne is fascinated, even entranced, by the ideological process itself: she is drawn to cultural moments at which the epiphenomenal by-products of social structures are transformed into the actual and permanent, and become inescapable self-evident truths about human – particularly female - reality. Desiring, impossibly, clarity and freedom, Takens-Milne searches for origins. Her work locates the crystallisation of contingent ideologies in the formation of iconic images; tracks these images back to their sources in particular films and photographs; and ambivalently reconstructs them - often with ironic reference to the ideologies’ constant numbing re-validation in the language of contemporary popular psychology.  At other times, the method is reversed: instances from film history of apparent reification are refigured, but the chosen scenes have achieved little if any cultural purchase; we are given a comic vision of the ideologies that failed. We are also invited to reflect on the fragility of the ones that survived. Film, with its immense power to naturalise, is the mode of discourse Takens-Milne both operates within and attempts to comprehend; her work is persistently interested in the relation between experience, cinematic presentation, and the looping mechanism by which the two affect and effect each other. The work is allusive in nature; but these videos surprise themselves – risible melodrama is a structural feature of her work – by being finally irreducible to, and inexplicable by, their origins.  We are on the loop. Her work often hints at the possibility of an insight into the real, a view of the ideological primal scene, but ends up, in its opacity, miming the process by which we, necessarily, come to accept the contingent as the given.