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The Four Humours, Welcome To Baltia (series) is comprised of four video art pieces from Warren Garland’s ongoing series Welcome To Baltia. Each video art piece uses found footage gathered from the internet to playfully explore the elements, philosophies and remedies that underpin the theory of humouralism and how these affect the mythological island of Baltia during a health emergency.
The video art pieces Blood-Sanguine, Yellow Bile-Choleric, Black Bile-Melancholia and Phlegm-Phlegmatic follow the chronological structure of humouralism. In it, the basic elements of the Empedocles model (air, fire, earth, water) correspond to seasons, sites of formation, and resulting temperaments. The series considers the psychological outlook of the humour which titles each film, how this applies to current day events, the projection of idealist dreams, and the pursuit of a perceived happiness in the future. It attributes our contemporary unrest and social upheaval to a humoural imbalance afflicting the body politic.
The collectables series The Four Humours, Welcome To Baltia accompanies the video art series and the exhibition The Four Humours by Warren Garland on view at Darling Pearls & Co’s website (February-May 2021).
Series: The Four Humours, Welcome To Baltia
Image rights: © Warren Garland
Warren Garland is a visual artist, printmaker, filmmaker, and curator born in Birmingham and based in London. His practice as a filmmaker is two-fold. He makes long form experimental documentaries that build conversations between historical references in British documentary and his personal background and lived experiences as well as short video art pieces consisting of found footage collected from the Internet then re-edited, cut out and collaged. In these short videos, he mostly works out of a self-constructed world called Baltia, which is a mythological island base somewhere in the Baltic Sea. This world allows the artist the freedom to manoeuvre and place himself in a purely fictitious world that parallels the real world of which he parodies, mimics and subverts through magical realist video and sound.