The relationship of text to image continues in a large-scale, silent video installation presented in the lower-ground floor gallery. In this work, thousands of cinematic cutouts, cropped from the bottom of the frame where subtitles typically feature, are collated and presented as a floor-to-ceiling column of 22 horizontal strips. Conceived as a ‘vertical poem’, fleeting extracts of English subtitles resembling lines of concrete poetry are overlaid on disparate, cinematic fragments that conjoin and flow in a dense, painterly tapestry of word and image. An overall structural logic allows the viewer to make subjective connections across numerous themes, peripheral actions, obscured scenes, frenetic camera movements and kaleidoscopic colours. Toying with our impulse to read images, the work serves to expose how the interpretation of cinematic tropes are both collective and personal. Various forms connect across different clips, echoing the artist’s works with paper fragments and his ‘Body Mix’ series in which figures from different record covers come together to make new composites.

Marclay has said that his use of collage – which relates to a Duchampian notion of the readymade as well as to the experimental approach of Fluxus – combines visual recognition with the shock of contextual transformation. In these two new video works, his use of the collaged fragment allows for a shift in focus, redirecting the eye from centre to edge, downward to the dirty corner of a street seen from above or the very bottom section of a film frame, and relocating it as the site of chance encounter and potential narrative.