A Tress of Hair

2008

Video, 11 mins, 48 sec.

A Tress of Hair is based on two short stories written by the nineteenth century French writer Guy de Maupassant. La Chevelure (A Tress of Hair) tells the story of a madman who finds a tress of hair hidden in an old cabinet and falls in love with it. Berthe (Bertha) is the story of a girl with learning difficulties, who is trained by her doctor to recognise mealtimes by the clock. When fused together, these two stories become an allegorical cycle of waste; waste of emotions, of obsession, and as Aly attempts to tell it through a precise choreography (using four performers and herself), it also translates into a poetic waste of movement. Through this limited vocabulary of dysfunctional movement, and narration taken from the original stories, Aly's video transports the viewer into a fragile universe heavy with aspiration and longing.

This work was part of A Prologue to the Past and Present State of Things, a group exhibition at Delfina Foundation. See the online catalogue in Ibraaz publications here.