Heidelberger Kunstverein

The 2002 two-channel video installation Here & Elsewhere presented for the first time in an institutional solo exhibition in Germany, shows a dialogue between a father and his captivating and precocious ten-year-old daughter. The father (British film critic and theoretician Peter Wollen) remains off-screen as he asks his daughter a series of questions that touch on various philosophical themes. To each question–about time, memory, body and being–the daughter pauses before responding with careful, honest answers. Her directness at once makes the topics accessible, while also revealing how difficult it is to understand and articulate questions of our own existence.

Tribe often cuts away from the interview to interior shots of the house or to outdoor views of Los Angeles. In some scenes, the conversation is shown alongside a shot of the girl engaged in a banal activity: napping on her couch or brushing her teeth. The philosophical conversation about time and being is at once given a recognizable location and temporality.

Tribe's piece is loosely adapted from a 1978 made-for-television documentary by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville titled FRANCE/TOUR/DETOUR/DEUX/ ENFANTS , in which Godard interviewed schoolchildren on a range of political and philosophical topics.