The video installations in Ana Torfs’s exhibition “Album Tracks A” work by way of overlappings and oppositions. Whereas the figures in the black-and-white sequences at first seem to be acting in complete isolation, suspended within abstract spaces, their stories soon prove to be powerfully interwoven with European political and intellectual history. In Battle, 1993/2009, the earliest work in the show, we see three singers statically juxtaposed in a video triptych as they sing Claudio Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624). On a separate screen, we can read the subtitles isolated

Right in the entryway of this show loomed the projected image of a “carousel” made of wooden table legs and staircase balusters. Three steps farther in, behind the wall on which this was projected, was a room that seemed like a hidden world. Here one saw in reality the jury-rigged carousel one had just seen in the video loop; the sound of the projection gave the regular, swaying motion of the various shapes an almost meditative sense of inevitability. Between the projection in the entryway and this procession of wooden furniture parts, the boundary between image and real space began to blur.