Marine Hugonnier
Until August 8; Dundee Contemporary Arts

DCA is a tardis. Whether the gallery can travel into the future is yet to be proven, but right now it certainly seems bigger on the inside than you’d ever imagine. The usual gallery area somehow manages to accommodate two cinemas and three spacious rooms for French-born artist Marine Hugonnier’s first big UK solo show.

Hugonnier is interested in the politics of landscape, and in our futile efforts to control and enhance the natural world. This point is made simply with a vase of flowers sprayed whiter than white and yellower than yellow, their natural beauty betrayed by a florist’s spray.

The idea recurs in the film The ‘Last Chance to See’ Tour, set in an age when all the great natural sites of the world are about to close. The silent subtitles claim that we want the Matterhorn to be even more synthetic than it already looks. For a few sparkling seconds, dancing elves are half-visible in amongst the deer. It’s a fantasy about having exclusive access to the mountain, and about it becoming everything we want it to be.

Mountains play a very different role in the film Ariana. The artist accompanies a crew to Afghanistan where they try to shoot a 360° panorama of the Hindu Kush range, an area of prime strategic importance. They meet with local resistance and gradually realise that the panorama imposes a kind of control over the landscape which has military, colonial and environmental implications.

The two films are effectively illustrated essays. The narrative is conveyed through a very earnest series of subtitles, bemoaning more than once the loss of ideologies in the world. People rarely appear. Most interesting of all is the sound – natural atmospheric noises are jarringly intercut with man-made sounds of engines, cities, transport; and there is a deliberate mismatch with the images. As a result you are constantly reminded of the presence of urban technologies behind the camera, even if they’re not visible in front of it.

As well as films, Hugonnier makes photographic prints of mountains, sea and sky, but she has a hidden agenda for each landscape. The Hindu Kush mountains are the same unnamed peaks which appear in Ariana, but the way these photographic portraits are hung suggests the kind of classification and territorial control which stopped the film crew in its tracks.

Thrillingly defying any kind of classification is an entirely black print called Leader. It was shot in Morocco in the dark of night. You stare at the image, trying hard to see the landscape which has formed in your imagination, and all you see is a reflection of yourself in the glass.

While Hugonnier’s films, photographs and installation are presented with panache, they fail to achieve more than the sum of their parts. Each is an interesting idea, carefully executed, but like the crew in Ariana, the artist leaves us only with isolated fragments of a bigger picture.

There’s plenty of material for philosophers here, but not a lot for the ordinary mortal to hold onto. Each of Hugonnier’s ideas is a spark of ingenuity, and maybe if she was a little less cautious, she’d succeed in setting the heather alight.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 11.07.04