Jaki Irvine: The Hottest Sun, The Darkest Hour: A Romance

The Hottest Sun, The Darkest Hour: A Romance, consists of five black and white16mm films. Shot in Rome and Tuscany over a period of 2 years, they are individually entitled Marco One Afternoon, Fireflies at 3am, Dani and Diego, Portrait of Daniela and Take-Off.

Rather than there being any obvious narrative developed from film to film, a sense of time and place and a way of being are slowly built up. Each individual work plays in its own cycle, but the simultaneous projections allow those cycles to inform one another. Images of fireflies shot on an Italian mountain; a young woman singing to her dog about the solitary nature of dreaming; a young man realising that a stranger in a bar is in fact himself fifteen years later. This installation explores the nature of intimacy, the play of memory and fantasy, and the seductions and estrangements of language.

'I’ve been thinking about the limits of a certain visibility that attaches itself to living privately, in public…and about those points where what at first seems most available to understanding, slowly turns opaque, revealing itself as misleading or meaningless. If this then opens out a sense of untold distances between things, and people, it also brings with it a desire for the reverse, gesturing towards impossibly compensatory intimacies between ourselves and the world… towards a belief in the transparency and agreement of things – of gestures, smiles, meanings, chance remarks and strangers.'

– Jaki Irvine