Extended Sea

Overview

Artist and television producer Nesrine Khodr works in moving image, print and performance. In her SB13 presentation Extended Sea (2017), she explores notions of mobility, constancy, duration and distance in a video installation, in which she films herself swimming back and forth across the frame—beginning in darkness, then continuing through sunrise, noon and sunset to return to darkness. Captured in a single twelve-hour shoot at an outdoor pool in Beirut, with the Mediterranean Sea in the background, she covers more than nine kilometers in real time.

The artist recalls that as she swam, ‘the movement of thoughts in and out of my mind became that of my crossing in and out of the frame’. In the video, she disappears at intervals—sometimes for a full hour—once at noon, once in the afternoon and a final time before sunset. Until she returns, the frame remains fixed on the still water as a handful of boats and swimmers drift by in the sea.

Khodr contemplates the distance she has crossed within the confines of the pool, wondering about the various destinations that she could have reached swimming nearly the same distance in the sea behind her. The Beirut airport, the shores of Turkey, the Greek island of Lesbos, perhaps even the Strait of Gibraltar?

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 13.