The Power Plant

Play Pause (2006) differs in many ways from Benning's well-known single-channel videos from the 1990s. Departing from her intensely personal, coming-of-age teenage works, this two-screen projected video installation, directed in collaboration with Solveig Nelson, comprises hundreds of drawings that weave in and out of public and private urban spaces. In the post-9/11 world depicted here, wars rage in the headlines and malfunctioning Diebold ATMs fail to provide receipts.

The video spans a day in an anonymous city suggestive of Chicago. Commuters on the train, workers digging up the street and a game of soccer give way to drinking, dancing and sex. The video's cycle slows to an end at dawn in an airport: a figure, neither distinctly male nor female, approaches the washrooms and hesitates before the two doors; security guards scan bags and faces; and a couple has sex on the wing of a plane as it takes off. Here, in this leaping between anonymous figures in the cityscape, the characters in Play Pause are not unlike those in Benning's earlier videos – isolated, lonely and wandering through the world as they explore and come to terms with their queer identities.