Erica Scourti video artist



	Ghost Story (3 min 40 sec, 2006) Ghost Story is a visual poem which uses the titles of celebrity autobiographies to tell the partial story of the artist’s life. Part truth, part fiction, the film questions the nature of personal experience through the prism of memory and addresses the porous boundary between ‘true life’ and fiction. " The voice in the video is not that of Erica Scourti herself, but belongs to Elisa McCave, who reads the texts on the books’ covers at varying speeds, giving Ghost Story an unexpected dramatic line that takes an ironic twist at the end. The viewer gladly obliges when asked to »Please smile«. Since the 1960s, artists have been exploring both in exhibitions and publications ways to tie together text and image. New media, the way images are perceived, language, visual and acoustic poetry are also at issue in Ghost Story. Erica Scourti thus transfers a classic theme of 20th-century art onto the medium of video, questioning the boundaries of traditional genres as well as the mechanisms of visualization. Echoes of Pop Art are evident here, including the selective use of images that have been processed for mass consumption and the ambivalent character of the work." [DK, Videonale 11, Kunstmuseum Bonn]