Palace is a two-and-a-half minute high definition moving image artwork. The film was written, directed and produced by Croft for gallery-based installation and screening.
With Palace, Croft sought to make an innovative contribution to the field of gallery-based artists’ moving image by focusing on what happens when desire, a key subject of traditional cinema, is depicted in the form of one perpetually extended sex scene.
Played on a seamless and endless loop, the viewer is left to contemplate the relationship between desire and boredom within the artifice of cinematic construction. Giving centre stage to a couple having sex in a cinema auditorium, Croft aims to enhance the reception of moving image practice in a contemporary art context by investigating how the cinema auditorium might be employed reflexively. Palace poses the question of what happens to the viewer, the subject of the film, and the film itself when an environment traditionally used to disseminate films is depicted through the lens of the cinema. Croft explores the doubling that occurs in Palace as a tautology, and whether its self-reflexive gesture sets up a paradigm that runs counter to the cinema and its tradition of using commercially driven images of desire.
Palace tests the viewer’s temporal relationship to a moving image devoid of sound and narrative. Heightening the spectator’s natural tendency to search for resolution, Croft methodologically employs a circular structure as a sub-textual system. Focusing on the potential of the loop, the structure of the film refuses the possibility of change.
Palace featured in a solo exhibition at Platform China Contemporary Art Institute, Beijing, supported by British Council China (2013). Other screenings and exhibitions included Fieldgate Gallery, London (2011), and Cinema Zuid, Antwerp (2011). Croft presented related research at the ‘Parallax View of Moving Image Practice’ conference, University of East London (2013).