Muted, the Videostudio exhibit at The Studio Museum delivers on its promise to elicit the viewer to assign voices to silent subjects and stretched my inner thoughts towards the creation or powerful emotions and feelings attached to personal interpretation. Four short (three silent and one musically scored) videos took me on an individualized emotive and thoughtful journey forcing conclusions when seemingly there were none. One piece in particular, There is This House, a silent subtitled narrative by Nanna Debois Buhl, stirred deep into my consciousness and intellect fueled by imagery, written word and historical recollection. Using a narrative akin to a children’s bedtime story reinforced by poetic repetition, Buhl challenged my imagination to weigh the beautiful imagery of a Virgin Island House and Garden, a religious mission and nature against the hard reality of the residual effects and moral consequences of the slave trade. The poignantly simple narrative entwines pristine imagery, raw feeling and a written historical narrative to draw basic conflicts between good and evil, light and dark, right and wrong. There is this House may not speak directly about colonialism, or slavery, or religious movements, but Buhl’s silence evoked images and vocalizations of historical characters trapped in a system void of learned reason and logic, and subject to the randomness of social experimentation.
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