The False Mirror

A springboard for the careers of generations of British household names since it opened in the 1960s, the BBC Television Centre in London has been a catalyst for creativity: from writers, producers and designers, to filmmakers, performers and musicians. To celebrate this heritage and the BBC's Centenary in 2022, Klenz took over the 9th floor of the BBC East Tower building, to create a video piece that plays homage to the heritage of BBC TV and Film productions as well as marks a moment of transition, as the Tower was demolished and the site of the BBC Television Centre in West-London being developed.

For her video piece The False Mirror, Klenz built a circular installation of mirror-shard fragments that created a kaleidoscopic effect to take place - reflections and refractions were filmed and everything within the mirrors’ side was bounced back to the camera itself. The differently shaped and sized mirror shards captured the specific venue of the BBC East Tower as well as captured the city of London visible through the windows of the space. While the video captures the interior of the space and the city, it also makes the camera, lights and the video crew a symbiotic part of the piece. Exposing the normally hidden internal structures of how productions used to be made, Klenz' video piece expresses the vital role of the camera and the production set by making it ‘perform itself’. In our current world of of AI, VR technology, motion capture systems, and various automation tools, her piece plays homage to the role of the film-maker and the mechanisms that used to be hidden from view and that no longer are.  In the past history of TV and Film production, it is those analogue and manual mechanisms that were able to produce a place, scenes, stories and broadcasts and it is Klenz' intentions of revealing the internal structures of how productions were made at the BBC Television Centre as well as preserving them forever on video.

The False Mirror merges the two sides of the seen and unseen into one video, operating on a kind of threshold between collage and photography: splicing, joining, cutting through, inverting and reverting, framing and slicing separate filmic image sequences together to create hybrid spatial formations that dissociate the viewer from the familiar. This idea is reflected also in the soundscape of the piece. The soundtrack is created by using ambient noises recorded at the time the video piece was filmed, and theme tunes of former BBC productions made in the BBC Tower.

Klenz' piece was influenced by Magritte’s painting of 1928 “The False Mirror”. In the painting the viewer perceives a giant eye as a frame of a blue sky with clouds. The pupil of the eye is in the centre of the white and blue sky. For me the interest of the painting lies at the border between the pupil and sky; and more importantly, the distinction between the two. As the viewer of the painting, one looks through the eye onto the world like looking through a window. At the same time though, the viewer is also looked at by the eye in the painting. Klenz' video piece makes strong connections to the painting and the circle in particular aims to have the effect of looking onto the scenery as well as becoming the scenery. The video raises a question about our visual connection to the world as well as the world itself, so here seeing/ viewing is to be understood literally as well as figuratively. The False Mirror positions the viewer in a strange in-between zone of space, camera and eye: the viewer is simultaneously before, within and behind the space that he/she is viewing, creating a world in which the viewer is able to see inside his/her own viewing.