The Car is installed in the abandoned Nicholls and Clark Building, on a busy road in Shoreditch, existing in unison with the heavy traffic that can be seen and heard. In a work that explores knowledge and memory as an ongoing process, there is an incessant reminder of travel and searching, with journeys being made outside, and the resulting new memories and histories being forged. Ruth Hinkel-Pevzner explains her reasoning for choosing this site: ‘The idea of a finding a disused space in the city for the exhibition venue was already there from the project's inception, both in relation to the voiceover, in which a woman recounts her search through the city, and for passing traffic to add another layer of sound. The exhibition venue also had to be large enough to accommodate the five screens with ample room for viewers to move through the space, mirroring the narrator's journey.’

The narrator’s journey is also mirrored in the use of sound in the 5 screen film piece that describes the search for a car. The repetition and shadowing of the voice suggests constant and returning memory. The parallel voices emphasise that this is many people’s stories; we’ve all looked for cars of loves, and lost ones, maybe a boyfriend who left or awaiting a father’s car returning from work. The somewhat jolting visuals are like moving photographs and postcards of a far off place inside one’s head and the voiceover like the scribbled messages on the back, reminders and signifiers. The text and image meet and move away from each other, like an impossible love affair. In a memorable sequence, the cars swarm down a street and while the voice describes the desire ‘to wrap myself within him’. The cars drive like this sensual ‘drive’ itself, with the urge to be close to another and with this moment there is a crescendo of synchonisity but then afterwards with palpable disappointment, the cars and voice separate. A moment’s unity and communion and then a return to aloneness. Wandering past the screens we are called back to the beginning as the film starts again on the first screen, the voices bring us to a perspective similar but not identical to where we were before. A search that seems inexhaustible.

Ruth explains: ‘The text and narration of the voiceovers is one of the defining element of my work. I've been writing in some form or another for over twenty years, but it was on reading Proust's 'Remembrance of Things Past', that I began to focus on how prose evokes memory, and began to look into the structure of language in constructing literature and creating a sense of time. The MA in English Literature was a chance to formalise this research and to look at literature from the perspective of linguistics and narrative structure. It takes over a year to get both the text and rhythm right in the films, and several more months of recording and editing the voiceover to fit just so with the moving images.’

‘The Car’ of the title, contrary to its suggestion, is not one car, nor represents one person, one loss. The universality is emphasised in the origin of the film itself. Ruth describes: ‘In the summer of 2006 I went to Russia to research material for the next project, Coalescence, which will also use material from the Library of Congress in the US and the BFI National Archives in the UK. Around the this time I'd also been trying to find visuals of cars for The Car. However, I wanted material set in a city that no one would recognise in keeping with the universal themes of the work. I thought the Russians might have some interesting material and indeed they did’. The foreigness and the use of footage from much earlier in the century makes the film far more of an abstract work, about a feeling, a human pulse.

And what of finding the car? If there is a sadness in the piece is it the finding and losing, or the finding and the having, that leads to disappointment? Ruth explained that ‘not to know something means there is always expectation, and this is a positive. An anticipation of what it would be, as opposed to realisation of what it is.’ Perhaps within the film this may be true, but you can’t avoid reality here – it’s outside the glass entrance, the noise and rattle press heavily, cars travel, buses tumble past. Leaving the space, and the narrator’s search one wonders; Who is watching for them to arrive? Who is watching, waiting, for me?

The Car
Ruth Hinkel- Pevzner
1- 26 May 2008
Nicholls & Clarke Building
3-10 Shoreditch High Street
London, E1 6PG
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T: +44 20 7371 2460

Opening Times:
Thursday & Friday 12 – 7pm
Saturday, Sunday,
Bank Holiday Monday 12 – 5pm

www.hinkel-pevzner.org