While attempting to find a Southwark street, I ventured into the Jerwood Visual Arts centre (Jerwood Space) and visited the superseding exhibition to the Jerwood Drawing Prize viewed a fortnight earlier. This Must Be The Place has been staged as part of the Jerwood Encounters exhibition and is curated by David Campany (writer, artist, curator and lecturer) and features the work of seven artists including Campany himself. The main thrust of the exhibition focuses on uses of photography as a research tool and displays images ranging from Dresden to Shanghai. Of anthropological interest is a sequence of some thirty three black and white images of a site in Barcelona photographed by Xavier Ribas. Entitled Nomads, the installation is a response to the plight of around sixty gypsy families who were removed from an empty industrial plot where they had settled. By 2004 the families had been initially intimidated and finally expelled from the land by the arrival of diggers that destroyed the area, thus making it uninhabitable. There is a degree of detachment and no authoritative assessment of the situation, which allows the audience space for subjective interpretation of the narrative.
Two of the exhibits that particularly resonated with me were a collection of limited edition hand-made books and a video installation. Dresden I-IX is a maquette for a suite of books made by Lillian Wilkie. Having never visited Dresden, but being aware of the destruction of the city during the bombings of 1945, I have a vague understanding of the geography and (historical) location through images and the anti-war literature of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. The images employed in the compilation of books are geometrically constructed compositions that allow audience interpolation through the device of neutral design and terse lines of text that underscore the imagery. The viewer can, to a point, create their own meaning from the neutrality of the sparse cityscapes.
The digital video installation by David Campany, One Way Street in China, caught my attention by means of the subject matter and the juxtaposition of projected still and moving images. Described as being “(a) collection of aphorisms and observations on city life published in 1928”, the title of Campany’s installation is derived from a text by Walter Benjamin entitled One Way Street. I am personally interested both in South East Asia and the phenomenon of experiencing things that are mundane as possessing almost mystical aspect when witnessed in a new country. An example of this can be seen in the work of the artist Camille Fallet (also one of the featured artists in the exhibition). When visiting London for the first time, he took a substantial number of photographs “as if he knew (that) his judgment would be most acute before he became too familiar with it”. Campany consciously made a small piece of work each day during his seventy day visit to Xiamen and Shanghai. This method of working alludes, to some degree, to Walter Benjamin’s (supposed) manner of writing the above text. A further reason for my interest in One Way Street in China lies in the mode of production and photojournalistic attributes possessed by the installation. A still image is “animated” by placing and removing a variety of objects (a wok, an ornament, a book & c) on a table in front of a reclining woman. Persistence of vision confounds spectator perception of the still and moving imagery. “Low tech” split screen footage is interwoven between monochromes that become polychrome saturated images.
