Photo50: No Place is an Island, 2022

Exhibition for the London Art Fair Photo50 Section, London, April 2022

No Place is an Island

Topical issues of our time, especially Brexit, followed by the Covid Pandemic and now the Global Climate Emergency, prompted me to think what it means to be an island in the contemporary world. The works in this exhibition echo this thought, revealing the multiple perspectives and dimensions of this subject.

The invitation to curate this latest version of Photo50 was the catalyst to bring together works by British and UK-based artists working with different interests around the idea of an island. The selection focuses on practices that experiment with the boundaries of photography, sculpture and performance, revising and re-configuring the medium as part of wider artistic practices.

It has also been 10 years since my friend and mentor the late Sue Steward curated the seminal ‘New Alchemists’ Photo50 exhibition. I am honoured to celebrate Sue’s legacy, working with some of the artists in her original show, and also talking about her work as part of the fair’s Photography Focus Day.

This exhibition is an invitation to travel to an island that feels both familiar and real but at the same time ineffable and fantastic. It is an island pieced together with fragments from places and times: it is a mirror but also a mirage. The show is divided into three areas, loosely described by the words Journey, Borders and Mythologies.

Journey is the start of the exhibition and presents works by Esther Teichmann and Alexander Mourant. Teichmann’s Heavy The Sea is a site-specific installation, where a small sailboat heads to the shores of a utopic paradise. Alongside Teichmann’s installation is Alexander Mourant’s A Vertigo Like Self. Originally a Super 8 film, it starts with a journey at sea, presenting image and film as diverging temporalities of a silent voyage to an island.  

Following the images of water as a liminal space, a second area of the exhibition focuses on the idea of Borders, both as geographical limit to the land, but also between the flat world of photographs and the three-dimensional world of the sculptural object.

In Aliki Braine’s Where two seas meet… the act of folding the photographic negative breaks the illusion of space suggested by the landscape in the image, “forcing the viewer to acknowledge the photograph as an object and the image as a construct.”

Eva Stenram’s New Meridians, are appropriated photographs intervened with her own markings inspired in the visual language of cartography. The resulting images allude to artificial divisions of the landscape, and specifically to systems of demarcation and containment. The series was made in response to the 2019 European Elections: “the ties in Europe, which held for so long, are once again uncertain. Grids and demarcations are being erased and redrawn, new meridians are being created.”

Dafna Talmor’s Constructed Landscapes also allow the photographic negative to be present as evidence of an elaborate construction: “One could say this conflation transforms place into space, a specific place that is initially loaded with personal meaning, memories and connotations to a space that has been emptied of subjectivity and becomes universal.” Further developing the ideas of borders, Hannah Hughes’ works create new spatial dimensions, transforming flat images into objects through performative actions such as folding, cutting and tucking.

Bindi Vora’s installation entitled White in the sea is a visual meditation, focusing on the surface of the sea and how it reflects and refracts natural light, evoking different atmospheres and moods. Although interested in the material properties of light, water and the photographic process, Vora’s installation also presents the sea as a boundless space, looking out from an imaginary shore.

Martin Seeds’ Assembly, experiments with the essence of analogue photography. Traveling to the Stormont Estate, home of the Northern Ireland Assembly, Seeds photographs plants, trees, and foliage, to then pair opposite versions of the same images, as a comment on the current political situation and struggles of the nation: “In 2018 the twenty year anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement passed uneventfully whilst the Assembly borne from it was silent. The prospect of a future Assembly has been twisted by and into the outcome of Brexit.”

Andy Sewell’s Strange and Known Things Pass comes back to the ocean, looking at how opposite sides of the Atlantic are connected across the seabed by hair-thin fibres transporting the digital information of the Internet. His work questions the notions of borders, and builds a multi-layered narrative about different temporalities, that of the physical and that of the virtual.

Mythologies is the third area of the show, and includes the works of Tom Hunter John Mclean, Shepherd Manyika, Tom Lovelace and Sarah Pickering. These works share an interest on the creation of visual narratives through a mixture of staging and composing for the camera.

Visiting the places where renowned British artists spent their formative years, John Mclean uses photography to distil aspects of the landscape which could have influenced and inspired their work. Tom Hunter’s images reinforce this interest in the British landscape, photographing ancient megalithic chalk figures, references to his childhood fictions and myths. This idea of staging is shared by the works of Shepherd Manyika and Tom Lovelace, focusing in the construction of the photographed scene, and the central role of the artist performing for the camera.

Lovelace is also interested in minimalism and sculpture, specifically on the materiality of photography and its possibilities as a final piece. For the Photography Focus Day, he is presenting a performance piece developed in collaboration with Emily Ryalls, responding to the different ideas developed in the exhibition.

Closing the journey are works from Sarah Pickering’s Explosions. For me, these images are an undeniable reference point in British contemporary photography. These sculptural explosions are also staged for the camera, and evidence her interest in simulacra, especially the theatricality of military training. The suspended existence of these ephemeral objects is amplified through its contrast with the quaint surrounding landscape.

Echoing John Donne’s celebrated No Man is an Island, this exhibition opens possibilities for connections and dialogue. It shows photography as inquisitive and expansive, inciting innovative collaborations with other creative practices and areas of knowledge.

Exhibition for the London Art Fair Photo50 Section,
Business Design Centre, London, April 2022

Artists:
Aliki Braine
Hannah Hughes
Tom Hunter
Tom Lovelace
John MacLean
Shepherd Manyika
Alexander Mourant
Sarah Pickering
Dafna Talmor
Esther Teichmann
Martin Seeds
Andy Sewell
Eva Stenram
Bindi Vora

Project Image: Eva Stenram: New Meridians
These pictures are appropriations of photographs found in late 1950s editions of the German travel magazine ‘Merian’. They are a record of the landscapes and towns of Europe as they were at the time of the Treaty of Rome, the beginning of the EEC, in 1957. Looking back at these pictures, Stenram overlays them with her own markings: vectors, lines and tangents suggesting new alignments, but vague enough to refrain from imposing a fixed key or cipher. The cartographic annotations suggest many things – lines of communication,movements of people or goods, borders, usage of the landscape, as well as systems and laws being put in place – but also fractures, fault-lines, rifts. In 2019, the ties in Europe, which held for so long, are once again uncertain. Grids and demarcations are being erased and redrawn, new meridians are being created. New Meridians was made in response to the 2019 European elections.