Tim Hyde © at Max Protetch Gallery
511 west 22nd Street, New York City
January 11 – February 17, 2007

Invisible City

Invisible City echoes the Italo Calvino novel in which Marco Polo recounts his travels to the reclusive emperor Kublai Khan. Marco Polo reenacts the places he has seen through "gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and horror, animal barking or hootings..." Hyde filmed Invisible City the first night he arrived in Belarus, recording an uncanny sequence of encounters in a city that does not feel wholly real. Like Marco Polo's performance, the work reconstructs an experience of strangeness, of being a stranger.

Tim Hyde © Invisible City
Single channel video projection & custom cinema constructed at Max Protetch Gallery

In Italo Calvino’s 1972 book “Invisible Cities”, a city is invisible in that it is malleable, continuously destroyed and rebuilt around the internal projections of each new visitor. Inspired by the Calvino novel, Invisible City is not a description of a place but a reenactment of an experience of strangeness, of being a stranger. A tribute to Calvino, “Invisible City” was filmed in Gomel, a small city in Belarus. The city is not far from the Zone, a two-hundred square mile stretch of land that was evacuated during the Chernobyl radiation leak in 1986. Time travels backwards in the Zone: the towns are disappearing under a new forest. The video was shot at night the first day I arrived in Belarus, and consciously uses disorientation as material to construct the view of the city.

Tim Hyde © Invisible City, 2005-2007
Single channel video projection, 5min, Sound

TIM HYDE / STUDIO

Invisible City