Yu Tsukada | The Body Revealed by Moving Shots: Special Screening "Fire in Water: Kosuke Nagata Video Works" (Part 2)
Part 2 examines how moving shots in Kosuke Nagata's "Suddenly This Overview" reveal the artist's body.Summary
This is the second part of a critical essay on the special screening "Fire in Water: Kosuke Nagata Video Works." Author Yu Tsukada compares Nagata's past work "Sierra" (2017) with his new work "Suddenly This Overview" (2026). While "Sierra" is a post-medium work that excavates the history of landscapes from the virtual space of a desktop, themed on the Mac OS name, "Suddenly This Overview" is based on actual visits to locations and centers on footage shot with the artist's handheld camera. Nagata's previous works mostly used fixed cameras, but this work introduces moving shots from car windows and across gravestones. In particular, the in-car shots filmed on the return from a cemetery in the final section evoke the car chase scene in Paul Thomas Anderson's "One Battle After Another," and are reinterpreted as a drama of the visible and invisible. Moving shots change the scenery through the cameraperson's movement, thereby bringing to the fore the artist's body, which had not been foregrounded before. Since 2019, when he began focusing on food as a theme, Nagata has been known as a loquacious artist, but his sophisticated logic can sometimes obscure his presence. Therefore, the body exposed as a negative in "Suddenly This Overview" is argued to have rare value.
(Source：artscape)