Static No.12 (seek stillness in movement)

Daniel Crooks’ ‘time-slice’ videos and photo projects since 1999 manipulate elements of digital video and imagery, breaking up the flows of real time and space experienced in conventional film and video into fluid, reassembled presentations of reality.

For the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010) Crooks premiered a new video, Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement) (2009–10), on Cockatoo Island, which takes as its subject the slow and graceful movements of a man he filmed randomly taking tai chi exercise in a Shanghai park. Crooks’ study of this gentle martial art is a meditation on the movements themselves, and the sequence of tai chi forms appear and disappear in a molten assemblage of attenuated body parts. The body’s movement spreads horizontally across the frame and the viewer becomes astonishingly aware of the entire span of the practitioner’s compelling routine, all at once, compressed into single moments and expanded across time.