Kirsten Mosher

Carmen 4. It's civilization, 1995

Kirsten Mosher’s video series Carmen addresses the boundaries between nature and civilization, art and life, private and public space, in which the human being – here as a battery-powered toy soldier, the ‘car-men’ – acts in an urban space. In Carmen 1, 2 and 3, Mosher has her figures crawl over a New York street intersection, a motorway and around a campfire in the wood. In It’s Civilization, five Carmen are wriggling along a snowy path to a viewpoint in the woods. Satellite Neighborhood shows Carmen and little trees hanging on a parachute. They have been thrown off the roof of the New York Art Gallery and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna into the streams of traffic in the two cities. The sequence ends with an abrupt cut just before they crash into the middle of the urban chaos.