Dead Horse

The British director and photographer Tim MacMillan is the inventor of the so-called ‘Time-Slice camera’. He developed several still cameras with which he could record on one image more than a normal camera allowed: a 360-degree shot, for instance, with the result looking like a flattened prefab building. Or a shot lasting 90 seconds showing a spiral of consecutive moments. In designing his cameras, MacMillan was inspired by the paintings of the Cubists, who recorded movement in time on a static canvas. Time and space are playful concepts for MacMillan; whether he takes photos or makes films, he wants to express the same thing in principle. A photo does not always have to show only one standpoint and one moment, just as film does not always have to be linear. For his installation Dead Horse, MacMillan developed a video loop, made with a Time-Slice camera, showing how two horses are killed in a slaughterhouse. The moment of their death passes in endless repetition. In the same way as MacMillan wants his photos to question the division between movement and eternal stillness, Dead Horse tugs at the apparently unbridgeable divide between life and death.