A R C H I V E2 0 0 0  
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  Tom Kalin
Third Known Nest
  USA 1991-1999
videotape – 37:37 min
 
This is a compilation of nine videos that Kalin made between 1991 and 1999. Each individual video is both separate from and connected to the others by literary quotes from writers including Virginia Woolf, Alfred Chester, Jane Bowles and Oscar Wilde. Kalin combines black-and-white fragments from films and home-videos, video images, music and text to form a dynamic and varied whole. He often shows close-ups of body parts, faces, cityscapes and landscapes. These images are sometimes blurred and snapshot-like, then again sharp and glossy, but the editing is always fast and gives a fast tempo and disorienting effect. Themes such as homosexuality, body and identity in the era of AIDS run like a thread through Kalin's work; through this video as well. 'Third Known Nest' starts with black-and-white images, romantic and vague, about a past love between two men. Fragments of male faces and bodies framed by the music of Cole Porter. In the next video Kalin shows us that he can be harsh as well. A glossy commercial shows various people appealing for better health care. Here, Kalin uses clear, coloured images of close-ups of faces and mouths. Elsewhere he takes the viewer along to images of isolation and loneliness. With a collage of fragments of different hotel rooms and apartments he shows the city in its full nakedness. Architecture as metaphor for the fears and prejudices that keep people apart. But Kalin does not avoid the use of humour when he combines warning words about the dangers of homosexual activity and light-hearted disco funk from the 1970s. 'Third Known Nest' culminates in a self-portrait in which Kalin with full abandon sings along with Roxy Music's 'Mother of Pearl'. An "intimate, visual diary", writes Kalin about this compilation. "Broken images from everyday life". A personal discourse on life in the '90s, in which AIDS, alienation, fear and isolation play a major role.

– Anita de Groot
Tom Kalin, 1962, Chicago
Lives and works in New York

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  Third Known Nest
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