Turner Prize 2002

Catherine Yass was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in recognition of her solo exhibition at aspreyjacques, London, and for representing Britain at the 10th Indian Triennial.

Yass is best known for her photographs, shown in lightboxes, of people and interior spaces. Her experimentation with methods of processing and colour in photography presents an intensified view of reality, evoking psychological states and the subconscious.

For her film Descent, a camera was lowered to the ground from a crane over a construction site at Canary Wharf, London, through thick fog. Yass adds to the perspectival distortions by screening the film upside down. A related sequence of photographs in lightboxes shot from the top of the building site with a stills camera creates a giddying sense of freefall. Buildings disintegrate into abstracted streaks of colour and light as the camera tilts downwards towards the ground. Her new work, Flight, shown here for the first time, was filmed from a remote controlled model helicopter flying around the roof of Broadcasting House, London. By revolving the image, Yass simultaneously captures our desire to fly and fear of falling.

"This exhibition comprised two films shown as DVD projections and a series of lightboxes. It marked a transition point in my work, which furthered my exploration of movement – of the human subject and that of the camera. This work had two central thematic concerns. First, to communicate an experience impossible to express, like falling or flying, as a person would be dead before they could describe it. Secondly, to explore what happens when a personal dream rubs up against a social one and how this develops into an ideal or a nightmare.

In both films, the camera is fixed to a moving object: In 'Descent' – a crane scaling the side of a skyscraper under construction in the Docklands, Canary Wharf; In 'Flight' – a small remote controlled helicopter circulating over BBC Broadcasting House in central London. The footage was manipulated – the images inverted and revolving respectively. The films communicate visceral experiences to the viewer whose point of view collapses into that of a machine. These methods obscure the potential transparency of the films’ structures, thus exceeding the Structuralist paradigm posed in films made by artists such as Michael Snow and Richard Serra.

Juxtaposing the films with the lightboxes compounded the exploration of movement by questioning the way in which we perceive ‘still’ images to be devoid of movement and moving images to be an expression of a subjective temporality."

• https://vimeo.com/22661210
• https://vimeo.com/87195231
• http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-bri...