Support the Whitney
Become a founding member today.Join now
Kerry Tribe’s film and video installations investigate the relationships among memory, subjectivity, and representation. The work on view in 2010 utilizes a documentary format to recount the case study of “H.M.,” a patient who underwent experimental surgery in the 1950s as a cure for epilepsy. After the treatment, which involved the removal of part of his brain, H.M. suffered from severe amnesia, with his short-term memory restricted to events of the prior twenty seconds. Tribe’s film weaves touching reenactments of interviews with H.M. with scientific animation, text, and archival images of iconic historical events H.M. cannot remember because they took place after his surgery. To evoke H.M.’s condition, this two-channel film installation uses a single strand of film threaded through two adjacent projectors with an interval of twenty seconds between them. The observation of the tandem projections brings awareness to the ephemeral nature of that brief interval, and by extension, the fragile nature of human perception.