Interfears

Interfears

In his new film, Jesper Just explores the emotional topography of an actor’s brain. Encaged in an fMRI scanner, the actor is reciting a monologue while the machine captures and presents his brain waves in two and three-dimensional representations. By combining enactments of feelings with fMRI technology, the film turns a clinical gaze on emotions as cultural artifacts and on emotional representations as artificial, whether played out by an actor or depicted by a machine. The claim that emotions are always produced in a socioculturally contaminated environment leads to the major point that emotions in general are in fact to a large degree performative – we can learn to do them right, and we follow protocol because we like to be readable as emotional subjects. The film takes this statement further by letting the actor present a character who has trouble feeling emotions, while at the same time monitoring the actor’s actual brain as it goes through pretended emotions. Here, fiction and anatomy come together highlighting connections between role-playing and everyday affects. If feelings are cultural objects, they can be staged and exhibited; here, they come as moving pictures.
Screening Schedule

No physical screenings scheduled.
Direction: Jesper Just
Script: Svala Vagnsdatter Andersen, Jesper Just
Cinematography: Kasper Tuxen
Editing: Jesper Just, Rikke Selin-Als
Sound: Jacob Garfield
Music: August Rosenbaum
Actors: Matt Dillon
Production: Anna Lena Films
Producers: Florence Cohen, Anna Lena Vaney
Co-production: macLYON, Perrotin, Galleri Nicolai Wallner
Make Up: Laurence Azouvy
Format: HD
Color: Color
Production Country: France
Production Year: 2023
Duration: 16'
Contact: Perrotin Gallery France
Neuroscientist: Margaux Romand-Monnier
MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts

Jesper Just

Jesper Just is a Danish artist who lives and works in New York. From 1997 to 2003, he studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. His work has been presented in several solo exhibitions, in venues such as the Galerie Perrotin in Tokyo, Japan (2021) the Galerie Perrotin in New York, USA (2020), the MAAT in Lisbon, Portugal (2019), and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France (2015), whereas he has work in museums including the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate Modern in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2013, Jesper Just represented Denmark at the 55th Venice Biennale. Jesper Just uses the language of cinema to confront and divert the stereotypical Hollywood constructs of masculinity and femininity, as well as the biased representation of minorities and people with disabilities in mainstream culture. His short films and multi-projection video installations question the mechanisms of cinematic identification and break viewers’ expectations of narrative closure by unfolding surrealist, emotionally ambiguous, open-ended, and often silent situations or encounters. Interested in how public and private spaces define and shape human interactions, Just further plays with the notion of architecture as a performer, to echo and expand his characters’ enigmatic journeys.

Filmography

2002 No Man Is an Island (short)
2003 This Love is Silent (short)
2004 Bliss and Heaven (short)
2005 Something to Love (short)
2006 It Will All End In Tears (short)
2007 A Vicious Undertow (short)
2007 Some Draughty Window (short)
2008 A Voyage in Dwelling (short)
2010 Sirens of Chrome (short)
2011 This Nameless Spectacle (short)
2015 Servitudes Film #7 (short)
2017 Continuous Monuments (short)
2018 Circuits (Interpassivities) (short)
2023 Interfears (short)