THE FOURTH WALL (2012)

The Fourth Wall attempts to reveal the influence of fiction on reality through the devotion to cinema in India. Passerby’s in the streets of Mumbai become actors by spontaneously choosing their own roles to perform for the camera. Conscious of the power of images, they give it their all, reflecting on their silver screen dreams by embracing their collective visual world and creating their own brief moments of suspension of disbelief. By weaving these performative photographs with still-lives made on actual movie sets, and newspaper articles that deal with some form of transgression between fantasy and reality, the distinction between fiction and fact become blurred and unimportant.

The work’s title refers to a different kind of rupture between reality and the celluloid world. A theatre stage consists of three walls; left, right and back. The fourth wall represents the imaginary screen through which the audience looks at the scenes unfold on stage. The actors, conscious of this barrier, tend to break through it now and then by hinting at their own fiction, acknowledging the camera and the act.

Research and Production by Victoria Gonzalez-Figueras

Reference texts & reviews:
Charlotte Cotton, IMA Magazine, Japan, 2013
Simon Bainbridge, British Journal of Photography, UK, 2013
Laura van Grinsven, Mamihlapinatapai exhibition catalogue, Belgium, 2012
Hans Theys, .tiff magazine, Belgium, 2012
Han Ceelen, De Morgen, Belgium, 2012

Book: The Fourth Wall, self-published by Max Pinckers, 2012