Framing, Masking, Revealing: Mark Lewis’s Regime of Projection

This article analyzes the complex and plethoric video artist Mark Lewis and his Willesden Launderette Reverse Dolly Pan Right Friday Prayers (2010), highlighting how he works with cinema theories and devices. The article demonstrates that the paradoxical allusions that Lewis’s work makes toward the ‘classical’ dispositif of cinematic projection shine a light and at the same time challenge cinematic theories and theories of perception. Moreover, the use of specifically cinematographic techniques such as the dolly or the rear projection screened in the museum context, and in a loop, displays the projected image in its hybridity and, more broadly, celebrates the cinematic dispositif while refusing to view it in a nostalgic way.