DISSONANCE

Conceived as a stand-alone work, the newly commissioned film DISSONANCE connects to Strafer’s film series Loophole (since 2023) without continuing the narrative of the trial. Instead, it opens another realm of justice, imagining a court beyond the bounds of state or religion and once again questioning its conditions.

In DISSONANCE Jordan Strafer introduces a talk show host played by Jim Fletcher, dressed in a U.S. soldier’s uniform. After greeting his audience, he leads them through a guided meditation recalling the memory of a first childhood home. Fletcher’s reappearance in DISSONANCE, following his role as defense attorney Ray in Loophole, is an instance of Strafer collapsing characters in her work, a recurring gesture that reflects her sustained interest in their ambiguity and interchangeability.

Filmed with historic analog television cameras in a 4:3 aspect ratio, DISSONANCE emulates the texture and immediacy of 1990s broadcast media. Together with the heightened emotionality of the cast audience, this formal choice draws directly on The Oprah Winfrey Show, which at the time offered a widely televised form of public confession and a kind of “felt jurisdiction.” The protagonist’s costume, dramatically mirrored in Fluentum’s historic interior, meanwhile recalls A Matter of Life and Death (1946), a key reference for the entire Loophole series. In that surreal afterlife courtroom drama directed by Powell and Pressburger, bureaucratic mistake in heaven fuels a tragic love story between a British soldier caught between life and death and a woman on earth. With this plot in mind, DISSONANCE can be also seen as staging a scene from an afterlife tribunal, offering yet another reflection on the entanglement of public verdict and individual fate.

DISSONANCE was shot during the opening of the eponymous solo exhibition of the artist at Fluentum and premiered during its run-time at the space as part of the exhibition.