Group exhibition co-curated by Shoair Mavlian and Monica Allende
Home, Harley Weir; Homeland Delirium, Emine Gozde Sevim; Borderlands, Nigel Swann; Costa, José Pedro Cortes; Euromaidan, Sergiy Lebedynskyy & Vladyslav Krasnoshchok.
The exhibition In Flux was conceived in response to the Greek crisis and opened in the summer of 2015 in the midst of the worst refugee crisis to grip Europe since the Second World War. The exhibition aimed to highlight the fluid and transitional nature of contemporary society, and the current state of flux. The year that followed saw the refugee crisis escalate and the unforeseen referendum in which Britain voted to leave the European Union. In 2017 we are still in a state of flux, and it’s time again to take stock and ask, what is the prevailing state of the EU?
In Flux brings together six international artists whose work reflects on our current state of flux and explores the fragility...of embedded institutional structures, how quickly they can be dismantled and the often immediate arrival of change. Focusing primarily on Europe and the neighbouring countries which lie on the peripheries of the European Union and have long been part of the European dialogue, the exhibition considers the current social, political, and economic climate in an attempt to take stock and present the different ways in which artists have responded to our changing circumstances.
The exhibition focuses on several themes including the physical documentations of the borders and landscape of Europe, the complex relationship between east and west, moments of protest and resistance, and migration and the refugee crisis. The events presented are both subtle and drastic, and include studies of the decaying and neglected European coastline by José Pedro Cortes, as well as documentation of the border in Northern Ireland by Nigel Swann, raising questions of the possibility of shifting borders post Brexit. Moments of upraising on the peripheries of Europe are captured by Ukrainian duo Sergiy Lebedynskyy and Vladyslav Krasnoshchok who were present during the explosive protests which occupied Maiden Square in Kiev in 2014. Similar the work of Emine Gozde Sevim navigates life in the increasingly volatile urban centre of Istanbul, and the work of Harley Weir brings attention to the ongoing refugee crisis prevalent across Europe.
Here the title of the exhibition holds a double meaning; In Flux not only refers to the current state of transition but also refers to the influx of people who with their jour- neys and experiences are equally changing and reshaping our current landscape.
The exhibition is both a chance to reflect on recent events and to pose questions to consider for the future as each artist offers different observations and perspectives on our current state of flux.
HARLEY WEIR, Home
United Kingdom, 1988
Homes by Harley Weir shows photographs made between 17 and 28 October in the migrant and refugee camps of Calais. Taken immediately before and during the clearing of this provisional settlement, Weir’s images bear witness to the humanity and ingenuity of those living there – constructing the domestic and familiar against a backdrop of displacement.
The photographs show us the homes and private spaces of the camp. In the face of oppression and indifference from those most poised to provide assistance, Homes shows a stubborn commitment to the small, personal spaces of humanity within the Calais camp.
All proceeds from the publication of Homes book will be donated to La Cimade, a French charity committed to protecting and defending the human rights of refugees and migrants.
EMINE GOZDE SEVIM, Homeland Delirium
Turkey, 1985
Emine Gozde Sevim’s recent project Homeland Delirium (2013) attempts to capture the feeling surrounding the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul in 2013. Although the images are documentary photographs and not staged, the cinematic quality gives the work an ‘other worldly’ feel which sits in stark contrast to the images of the protest we are accustomed to seeing in the mainstream media. The work juxtaposes the everyday with moments of chaos creating delirium and confusion between truth and fiction resulting in the presentation of an alternative narrative of life during a momento of uprising.
NIGEL SWANN, Borderlands
Northern Ireland, 1962
Nigel Swann was born in the Northern Irish border county of Armagh in 1962 and has lived in the Southern Irish border county of Louth since the late 1990s. Throughout his lifetime he has experienced the border region as both a heavily militarised apparatus during the “Troubles” and as an invisible, frictionless border after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
Following the announcement by the British government of the referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union, Swann embarked on a photographic project to document the border regions separating Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland, pursuing his enquiry through the two main components of his photographic practice, “landscape and memory” and “genius loci”. His ongoing project is concerned with documenting the visual clues that remain visible in this palimpsest landscape: the echoes of previous situations and sentiments which speak of the present political ‘flux’.
JOSÉ PEDRO CORTES, Costa
Portugal, 1976
José Pedro Cortes work seems at times post-apocalyptic, dried, bleached out, as if everything is slowly dying under the heat of the blazing sun. However his series Costa is in fact documenting a beach side suburb only 14km outside of the capital Lisbon. In Costa, Cortes documented the Costa da Caparica, a suburb south of Lisbon whose beaches are among the most visited by Lisbon residence. However Costa da Caparica is also a zone with pockets of social and urban precarity, a place in which the leisure economy and urban regeneration policies have not been effective enough to eliminate social, architectural and environmental vulnerability.
The sequence of the installation suggests a journey made by the photographer, both physically and mentally, along the Costa da Caprica, according to Cortes: “the images speak of that strip that exists between the last reach of civilisation and the beach. Shacks, some belonging to fisherman, with little reason for existing, outmoded architecture, remains of houses, dirt left by the tide, an agglomeration of nondescript houses and streets – a peripheral, end-of-the-line location. A frontier zone, on the outskirts of a larger mass, disfigured by time and by the anarchic will of man”. This analogy of a periphery left isolated on the outskirts of the larger mass could be attributed to much of the coastline of Spain and Portugal which following the economic crisis is largely a forgotten wasteland of unfinished developments and abandoned tourism.
SERGIY LEBEDYNSKYY & VLADYSLAV KRASNOSHCHOK, Euromaidan
Ukraine, 1982 & 1980
On the 19th of January 2014 a peaceful protest of Ukrainian Euromaidans on the Hrushevskyi Street in Kiev turned into the possible beginnings of a civil war. It quickly escalated with explosions of gas grenades, Molotov cocktails, shootings of activists by the special police unit “Berkut”, abductions of people to the forest and acts of torture employed by the dictatorial regime. It was during this time that Sergiy Lebedynskyy and Vlad Krasnoshchok travelled to Kiev and spent two days documenting these events.
In the months following the protests in Kiev Lebedynskyy and Krasnoshchok followed the unrest, this time turing their cameras on the Pro-Russian region of Donbass in Eastern Ukraine. This ongoing conflict continues largely unreported in the Western media despite its relatively close location on the peripheries of Europe.
Entrada actualizada el el 28 ago de 2017
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