MIAMI BEACH — When I was much younger, I was obsessed with the writings of Ryszard Kapuściński. He was a journalist, yet not a journalist — more like a poet journalist — and he traveled to forbidding and barren places and described what he saw in exquisitely observed prose, with understated humor. I often thought with envy then that this kind of life, wandering into unknown places, especially cultures with a real antipathy toward independent women, could never be the life and career of a woman; it was the sole preserve of men. But this is not entirely true. Janet Biggs is a modern-day adventurer, an explorer in the best sense. Not a white male imperialist, but a woman keen to see the edges and create aesthetic experiences from within those spaces.
In the past few years Biggs has visited a number of extreme landscapes to make work: crystal caverns below the German Merkers salt mine, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, the Arctic. Often her videos are structured as binaries in which two specific subcultures or specialized environments are paired with one another to create meaning.
Such is the case with two of Biggs’s earlier single-channel works, Vanishing Point (2009) and “Duet” (2010), screened in Miami Beach last weekend, outdoors on the New World Center’s projection wall, which appears to be roughly six stories high. Biggs’s videos were presented by Cristin Tierney Gallery as part of the Art Basel Miami Beach Film program, called Our Hidden Futures and curated by David Gryn, who’s also the director of Daata Editions and London’s Artprojx.
