An awareness of time passing and how time is either filled or wasted waiting for something to happen is a predominant feature of Sebastian Buerkner’s animation works.

One of his early works Peak Project (2005) presents a complex cast of characters in a semi-vaudeville, behind the scenes environment that suggests a TV studio, or a theatre in the process of being set up, in the middle of a rehearsal or just waiting for the main event to happen. A row of four tortoises on stands run through their big number in front of the microphones, a man in an electric, colourful collar with an ever-changing pattern tries to learn his lines, while a microphone is rigged for a toy soldier to do his stuff. The feelings of boredom and anticipation are almost palpable as Buerkner’s characters wait, shift uneasily about and otherwise mark out time in their strange surroundings, overseen by the giant monkey god head in the rafters.

A comparison has been made on a number of occasions between Buerkner’s work and the tortuous frustrations and repetitions of Samuel Beckett’s work. In Peak Project, two Beckett-like characters sit high on a beam, nudging each other in a desolate huddle as they overlook an egg, rolling lazily around within the circumference of a fastened belt, while a elongated white triangular prism moves with purpose through the background of a number of scenes, blinking its little beady eyes.

This is certainly not reality as we know it. Buerkner’s situations have a magical, dreamlike quality to them that seriously challenge our understanding of any space or time continuum: a man’s fingers are chopped off by an axe, only to be miraculously reinstated by a woman’s healing hand being placed over them, while the harvested fingers are stored neatly in box, perfectly designed for the job.

Buerkner has continued to create these fantastical spaces in his subsequent films, which have become richer, faster-paced and more complex over time. A whole visual language, bordering on the surreal, has been developed throughout the period that he has been making animations.

Originally studying as a painter, Buerkner became interested in animation during his MA at Chelsea College, where he taught himself how to build and create animations using Macromedia Flash. Using the limitations of the programme, Beurkner has worked out his own unique style that works with the abstract flatness of Flash to create an animated space that is simultaneously constructed and deconstructed by his use of repetition and style of fast-cut editing.

In many ways Sebastian Buerkner’s short film Filing Project (2004) can be seen as a sketch for both Peak Project and Walker (2005), and as a signifier of how his practice has gone on to develop, in that it establishes a set of specific images that have been employed through following works. The imagery of burning candles, crystals, light bulbs, hands, feet and highly painted finger nails act as visual lexicon in his practice, the exact meaning and significance of which remain private to the artist. These images are repeated, loop back on themselves and are altered slightly to create a dizzying, stroboscopic effect, where the viewer is left trying to search out, retain and understand the dense visual language that has been created.

While Filing Project sets up the complexity for the viewer of having to look at the rapidly changing images and listen simultaneously – the soundtrack is this work is of an increasingly hysterical, semi-deranged answering machine message – Buerkner’s more recent works have concentrated on the building and layering of complex fast-cut images that are often difficult to process, but which rely upon the viewer’s complicity in a process of visual accumulation and association that is so intense that it almost has a physical effect upon the viewer.

The complex and fragmentary nature of Buerkner’s practice is often added to through the use of multiple projections. One such work, Turf Waltz (2006) uses a double projection to create a dual portrait of one day’s events. The work shows the fragility and unreliability of memory; the two streams of the projection ultimately end up at the same, shared scene but along the away each strand of the ‘story’ has its own pattern of repetitions, diversions and sequences of scenes. The structure of the work seems to mimic the building blocks of memory, which can seem to be so certain, but can be altered, undermined, changed, proved false or inaccurate over time. The way that the work is shown means that the two parts never reveal their relationship to each other setting up the possibility that what is seen is a shared experience by two people or one person’s interpretation of two separate occasions.

In Buerkner’s work Purple Grey (2006) there is no doubt about the point of perspective in the piece’s narrative thrust as we watch the protagonist procrastinate from, and struggle with, his appointed task (on this occasion the writing of a text). We see him, surrounded by the detritus of another day’s inactivity, cleaning his nails with a pencil, smoking cigarettes, drumming out rhythms on his desk, anything to avoid knuckling down to work. Meanwhile his active imagination takes him away from the drab, grey surroundings of his office into a luscious, brightly coloured world of his imagination, offering a welcome relief from the tedium of the day. His flashbacks and the fantastic world of his imagination offer a tantalising glimpse into his subconscious mind; a skull with hot dogs coming out of its eyes, a woman with fingernails painted like a reverse ladybird, a beautiful brightly-coloured bird all appear and disappear rapidly. As with Peak Project there is a real sense of time being marked out, and rather than a feeling of anticipation here there is an almost painful marking out of time, watching the clock until it is time to give up, admit defeat for the day and go home.

Kirsty Ogg is a freelance curator based in London. She is Director of ATP London and is the former Director of The Showroom (London).