- Venue
- South Hill Park Arts Centre
- Location
- South East England
This moving image and video art exhibition focuses on Asian and Black artists who practise in digital moving image, photography, animation, video and installation. It is a part of the Flicks International Film Festival that runs between the 14 – 23 October. The work is exhibited in the Mansion Spaces at South Hill Park; this also includes the Atrium Projection space. This exhibition has been curated by Jaswinder Singh and Dr Outi Remes.
The exhibition includes ‘The Kitchen’ by Bindu Mehra, ‘[re]locate (The Incident) by Tahera Aziz, ‘Ginevra’ by Daniel Loganathan and ‘Eyes of Others’ by Alice Pennefather.
Loganathan’s video, ‘Ginevra’, (1 minute 30 seconds), highlights the use of technology within art by using different copies of the same painting in his work. By running the images in quick succession it enhances his questions of how technology affects art because the difference between the images is exaggerated. He poses the question of the viewer’s relationship with art and technology but this immediately causes me to think of the artist’s relationship with technology, a question that Loganathan has not raised. The question of technology tackles the issues that their work addresses but also uses it to enhance the message, an interesting concept particularly in the grand mansion of South Hill Park Arts Centre.
This is also the case in Bindu Mehra’s installation. She had envisaged the dark and lonely place of the kitchen where Indian women are exiled to, but it thereby becomes their refuge. The gallery has been designed to be as dark as possible, by blacking out the windows to emphasise the claustrophobic space of the kitchen but also metaphorically as the women are emotionally kept in that place as well. I see this work as exaggerating an issue that I am sure is relevant in the past and present. The space and technology has been used to create an idea about a submissive identity.
Mehra uses technology in the form of a projected short film and a sound track to heighten the intensity of the room. The sound is a repetitive beat that controls and imprisons the viewer. The viewer watches the projection out of the kitchen window, further encouraging an insight into the unviable outside world for the Indian woman. The room is dark with one light source in the kitchen itself. This lack of light only highlights the desire to look out as the projection itself acting as a light source. It encourages the narrow and shadowy space to become even more repressive as the projector, which is a video of computer manipulated urban images, provides a reminder of what the women are closed off from, but also it is literal and accurate as cars and other houses could certainly be seen out of kitchen windows.
Loganathan poses the question of ‘How does this [technology] affect our understanding of the images?’ and I believe that it most certainly does affect our perception of the works. I would suggest that without the technology ‘The Kitchen’ would not have as much hold over the visitor and would not be as successful in describing the emotions felt by these women confined to their kitchen.
The sound used by Aziz is vital to the video ‘[re]locate (The Incident)’, (4 mins 12 seconds), as the screen is the same static image of a bus stop. This provides an obvious contrast to the chaotic and perhaps confusing sound that the viewer must listen to in order to understand the work. The bus stop is a uninspiring but it is somehow related to everyone. Despite its somewhat dull appearance it is exactly this that attracts the artist as it is the location of the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. This ordinary place is the location for a horrifying and brutal event, something that is only discovered by listening to the sound and reading the background information to the work. The aural element of this work consists of a police radio conversation, footsteps, traffic sounds and talking, which I am led to believe is a re-enactment of the events of Lawrence’s murder. As I was a child when this appalling event took place and listening to the audio aspect of the work for the first time I went on to research what I could about what happened. Only through this did I become to appreciate this work further.
The bus stop acts as a memorial of Lawrence’s death, people use it everyday, perhaps unknowingly of its history.
The Flicks Exhibition produces an antithesis of what is expected. The artists are using mundane, everyday objects but are turning them into opposites of what they appear to be. They are transformed into complex and poignant aspects of life that exist in society today. The objects in all these works have been transformed and disrupted by understanding and technology into more complex questions about society and art itself.
