The Doomed Gesture in All Its Forms

Drawing from sources including her own memories and experiences, literature, poetry, science, and art history, Nina Yuen merges the personal and the universal in her videos. Incorporating herself into her films as protagonist and narrator, she builds dreamlike, loosely constructed scenes out of hypnotic image series that seem to unspool into snippets of music and the rhythm of her voice, as she recites poetry, reads passages from a wide assortment of texts, and recounts her own and other people’s memories. Nature figures prominently in her work. Branches and trees stand in for human beings, dry leaves become two elks locking horns, and a copse of trees becomes an inchoate, existential menace. Though such weighty philosophical themes as death, time and beauty run throughout her films, Yuen’s humour keeps things light, surprising and strange.