Battle of the Titans

Description:

While in residence at Western Front in January 1990, Kati Campbell produced the video work Battle of the Titans. The project extended Campbell’s investigation into the representation of women as the site of reproduction, the conditions of women’s labour, and the child’s entry into the symbolic order through language. 

The work comprises two related parts and centres on an edited sequence in which Campbell attempts to dress her child, who persistently resists. The interaction shifts between playful negotiation and escalating conflict, documenting a struggle of wills. The second component documents Campbell’s child watching this dressing sequence on a monitor in the Grand Luxe Hall. 

In 1992, Battle of the Titans was exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery as a four-channel video installation. The dressing sequence was projected on an eighteen-foot screen across which two suspended, revolving body-like forms that referenced Hans Bellmer’s Surrealist dolls, rotated laterally. The footage shot in the Grand Luxe Hall was edited into a three-channel installation, with each monitor showing the same material slightly altered—looped or slowed down at different points. 

Video documentation is available upon request.