“Fascinating and ravishing for me, is the image of a body in situation”

Roland Barthes

Ninar Esber’s filmed actions slowly and gracefully unfurl, within a space and time that bar editing and slow motion plays. Scenes follow action ; no repeats no link shots. What matters here, is the accuracy of the movement, its tempo and delicacy, as well as its sharp and definitive nature. In this regard, the video works produced by the artist since the year 2000 are not cinema-generated. It is the performance ? understood not as an aesthetic genre but rather as a practical experience of aestheticism - which props up these films.

This, in no way implies that the scenes make do with a mere reproduction-representation of actions, whose sole meaning is to be there. Ninar Esber’s films are not filmed performances but genuine works of fictions, using performance as a tool or even a method likely to open up the field of narration.

Refusing to conform to the effects of the continuous loop or installation’s rhetoric, the works bring in a changing network of the materials, shapes, movements, rituals and narrative elements, whose common denominators are : seduction and desire, and delight and refinement.
In these stories ? marked by an impassivity, close to tradition ? the slightest rustle, the lightest gesture or sliding takes on the importance of a true event. Ninar Esber’s art makes itself available for whatever happens, giving first priority to such processes as intrusion, infiltration and installation which, surreptitiously, push these fables to the borderline of stillness, in an atmosphere of disturbing strangeness.

Bernard Marcade