2011
1 channel color HD video with sound, 4’34’’
Edition of 5

In Adrien Missika's recent film "Black Sand Beach" (2011), a dead tree stands upright on a Hawaiian shore, supported by a tangle of roots some two metres tall. The base of the tree's trunk appears to hover just above the blue line of the horizon, as though the Pacific archipelago were retreating towards the Earth's core, leaving the plant's hidden parts exposed. To the lulling melody of Hui OHANA's slack-key guitar classic "Sweet Lei Mokihana" (1973), we see a pair of dogs trotting across the black sands, where they are soon joined by a couple of ageing guys who resemble Lawrence WEINER and Jeff BRIDGES, were they to wave their respective goodbyes to the art world and Hollywood stardom and spend their remaining days as surf bums. The Jeff BRIDGES guy pats the caramel Labrador, the Lawrence WEINER guy swings gently from the tree's upper roots, and then they wander out of frame, followed by the dogs. "Black Sand Beach" is, by any measure, a film in which very little happens, but its air of honeyed melancholy is oddly affecting. On the shore, in their board shorts and beards, the two men seem to patiently await the end of the world. (Tom MORTON)