Perhaps, things merely are. Yet some maintain that we can perceive them only in reference to the known past. The present fails us. Things only exist as an association – like falling cheeks reminding of the recently ended laughter. Others, with greater trust in the immediate glance, believe we can behold the now. They too, though, warn that objects, lifeless or alive, often play a mnemonic trick on the perceiver. The very act of paying attention to an object makes many involuntarily ponder on its history, and the more so, when the object is human. Hardly ever – unless one is in the course of affectionately staring into a pram – does one contemplate what the opposite’s future might hold. You rather try to read their every physical trace in search of a hopefully eventful past. Many a newspaper features long and detailed obituaries, but I can’t think of one that regularly forecasts the futures of newly borns. It could be exciting.

But if things generally are or evoke a past reality, the future might become something of a minefield. It escapes all matter-of-fact consciousness. It is at its best a good guess. No matter how often the future is declared as the place for desire, it never really seems a desired reality. Too readily does awareness of the future translate into a fretful attempt at preservation, at decorating the past or prolonging the present. Even if transparent things – an exception for they may delude the eye – might in their seeming non-existence just merely be, they will not deflect from the history of the objects they are covering. To the contrary, they underline their antiquated character. They make them museum pieces.

And I guess that is one of the reasons why one layer of cling film just didn’t do the job. One layer of cling film is ‘suitable for keeping all foods fresh and odour free for longer, including fatty foods’. One layer would preserve the object’s present for a while, but for the onlooker, it would have to appear as nothing but a past desire: last week’s steak. Yet how then did Andréa Hasler make the future a desirable stage of existence? Perhaps it is through the marriage of the portrayed and the perceiver. The object is evidently human, but this evidence is slight enough not to break the tentative ties of identification. The object’s existence in time becomes the onlooker’s. When such existence is wrapped and wrapped again in ever less transparent layers of cling film, its past becomes invisible and its present a suffocated impossibility. The future is its only consoling option – for once.

Yet, Andréa Hasler’s triptych of video stills does not only prevent the onlookers from revisiting their familiar memory lanes. Neither does it merely replace the drifting back with a desire to know of the portrayed person’s future. That would be too quick a glance. If you rest on them for a while, the stills actually become still things. They place you right on the middle part of that seesaw that balances past and future. You may wind back and fast forward a little: it won’t jeopardise the very present. The images already are. The future is a breather, and for the past, it must have been fun doing it.