“I, who have felt the horror of mirrors Not only in front of the impenetrable crystal Where there ends and begins, uninhabitable, An impossible space of reflections” —Jorge Luis Borges, Mirrors (in Dreamtigers) History forgets. Obscures, revises, obliterates, but principally, forgets; forgoes, forges afresh: an histoire. What should be a deeply layered, patinated place, Cancún, […]
“What I can name cannot really prick me,” Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida, positing that the photographic image, ironically, is activated not by its sense of verisimilitude but precisely the opposite: the presence of the indefinable, the unnameable. An image which is entirely explained and explainable – in which meaning exists in a closed […]
Aglaia Konrad’s work across photography and film surveys the built form with a quiet, careful regard. Her studies of architecture function individually as documents, portraits, yet together transcend any reductive reading to form a corpus which mines greater depths. Circling the indeterminate, liminal spaces where the built abuts the unbuilt, the enclosed faces the excluded, […]
“The territory in question must be able to exist in any region on the surface of the globe; therefore we must study under what conditions it remains inaccessible, not only to ships, airplanes or other vehicles, but even to the eye. I mean that it might be possible, theoretically, for it to exist in the […]
Seamus Harahan’s is a ludic world of porous borders in which the agency of the author hesitates and modulates, confronts then eludes the viewer. In two new video works Cold Open, 2010, and Auftakt, 2011, the artist pursues a game of and about chance, and about the construction of meaning via inference and implication, creating […]
After the death of God, there was no return to earth or radical re-imagining: our secrets and fears stayed skybound. Now data is ‘served’ to us magnanimously, ‘pushed’ down to we leaden receptacles, we mute receivers. ‘On earth’ – whatever that may mean now – we search for meaning in barren soil under the beneficent […]
The light passes from ridge to ridge, from flower to flower – the hepaticas, wide-spread under the light grow faint – the petals reach inward, the blue tips bend toward the bluer heart and the flowers are lost. -HD, from Evening (in Sea Garden, 1916) It is all too easy to look but not […]
The current iteration of Artists’ Film International explores, via five films, themes of displacement, migration, transience and loss. At the same time, the works crystallise some current threads in artists’ moving image practice: the documentary and the ‘social turn’; the abiding importance of the performative; and a rekindled interest in language. Indeed, a wider sense […]