to watch the video on Vimeo: use the password adamandeve
KAIN & ABEL is a single channel video installation by Klaus Verscheure. The video lasts 13 minutes 46 seconds. The soundtrack is a composition by Mirek Coutigny & Tom McRae and isperformed by the Spectra Ensemble.
CONCEPT/ this video installation is based on the story from the Old Testament in which two brothers fight each other and one of them kills the other. This video is a contemporary interpretation of that Biblical horror. Not much remains of the religious story, except the action of the murder. The video aesthetically exposes the horror with which religion has been telling stories for centuries in order to keep its believers under its thumb. In this installation, it is no longer about the story in itself. The video ’imagines’ what was once written and confronts the spectator with this image. How long do you watch a fight that you know will end in death?
IDEA/ the theme of KAIN & ABEL has been a recurring theme in Western art for centuries. Names such as Rubens, Pietro Novelli, Danieli Crespi, Michiel Coxcie, Luca Giordano ... to name but a few, were happy to be inspired by the theme of the murdering brother. Also more recent artists like Marc Chagall, Keith Vaughan and contemporary artists like Adi Nes, Pierre et Gilles, ... show their fascination for this story in their work. But even in the Islamic religion, we find the theme of Cain and Abel. They describe it as follows: No soul is wrongfully killed except that some of the burden falls upon the son of Adam, for he was the first to establish the practice of murder. I think this clearly shows man’s fascination with, and desire for, violence. It also shows that mankind has always used violence as an image to avoid other violence. The death penalty was the clearest example of this. If you kill someone, society will kill you ...’, ’an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ and so on.
Cain and Abel were the two eldest sons of Adam and Eve, it was the generation that followed this first couple that according to the Old Testament populated the earth. ADAM&EVE/EVE&ADAM is the title (and the subject) of my previous video installation. It therefore seems logical to me that KAIN&ABEL should be the next piece in my oeuvre as a video artist.
What if we are held up to a mirror in such actions? What if the murderer is a copy of the victim and the victim is also a copy of the murderer? What if both are suddenly interchangeable? Who is the murderer and who is the victim? For whom do we feel sympathy then?
The video installation KAIN&ABEL plays on this confusion. In this video, you see two identical men, identical twins (?) fighting each other. At the beginning of the video, the men are very stylishly dressed in identical tailor-made suits. The video is shown on one screen, but is edited in split screens.
to watch the video on Vimeo: use the password adamandeve