Touch

Janine Antoni’s works are marked by her desire to make visible the intimacy of the artistic process and the journey of the self entwined within the material progress of an art work. Sensuous, soft but visceral in their effect, her works transcend the distinctions between conceptual art, sculpture and performance art.

Touch (2002) explores the idea of a horizon and what it represents to the human being. The horizon —an imaginary line where sky meets the earth— is a line pregnant with possibilities but impossible to touch: An illusion which moves away as you move close. In Touch, the artist is filmed as she walks a tightrope positioned against a seascape opposite her childhood home in the Bahamas, a group of Caribbean islands where Christopher Columbus alighted in 1492 at the end of his own journey towards an unknown horizon, having set out on a miscalculated quest to find a short sea route to the riches of Asia.

In Touch, Antoni positions the camera in such a way that in one magical moment, as she walks precariously across the frame, the tightrope dips with her weight and the artist ‘touches’ the line of the horizon– symbolically disembarking on a point that seafarers across history have striven towards.