Black Hole Radio

Over the past 20 years, filmmaker Jem Cohen has assembled a massive visual archive of Super 8 and 16mm by filming everyday images and experiences as he negotiates his way through the spaces of New York City. Filled with enigmatic glimpses, gestures and images seeming to come from half-remembered dreams, memories and snatches of conversations, this archive contains hints for unearthing the many secrets of contemporary metropolitan life.
In the mid 1990s Cohen encountered a series of advertisements for a New York City ‘Phone Confession Line’.To call in and confess was free; to listen cost money. Cohen acquired recordings of these taped confessions of murderous thoughts, desire and treachery, and used them to form the audio heartbeat of his video installation ‘Black Hole Radio’. Accompanied by ghostly Super 8 images filmed by the artist during his nocturnal wanderings, the installation reveals the anonymous lives and restless spirits that haunt the phonelines, televisions and sleepless nights of the city.
For this version of the installation, ACMI has worked with the artist to create a small confessional cell where images shimmer like paranoid hallucinations while disturbing whispers hang in mid-air, semi-publicly. The elusive images that linger on the edge of visual perception provide the evidence of Cohen’s investigation into the small confessed ‘crimes’: loving the wrong man, harbouring hatred or greed. Visitors leave ‘Black Hole Radio’ feeling the way they do when a shameful memory wakes them in the dead of night. Inside Cohen’s confessional, it is understood that it is both a privilege and a curse: to live as social beings and to know that isolation and forgetting can’t conceal the troubled heart of the city.