Kerry Tribe

Through film, performance and installation Kerry Tribe creates time-based works that explore memory, subjectivity, place and time. Adopting conceptual, cinematic and journalistic approaches in her work, Tribe navigates the relationship between representation, reality and intricate processes of thought. Her affective works operate at the intersection of simulation and authenticity, dwelling on the limitations of linguistics, perception and cognition. For example, in her work The Last Soviet (2010), the film follows a Russian cosmonaut lost in space, with two narrators speaking in both English and Russian, blending languages in the conversation about fate and emotion. Her work H.M. (2009) implements tools of reenactment, voiceover, found footage and text to reconstruct the portrait of Henry Molaison, a patient whose case is considered to be revolutionary in our understanding of human memory. Exhibited as two synchronised yet intentionally dissonant projections, the very structure of the film that degrades with its every screening alludes to the fragility of artistic medium and its subject’s fading memory. Accordingly, from health care to empathy to neuroscience, Tribe’s moving image works immerse her audience in topics that inspire contemplation on the very nature of human existence.