Artists: John Akomfrah (UK), Ed Atkins (UK), Marco Brambilla (Italy/US), Walead Beshty (US), Lauren Brincat (Australia), Thomas Demand (Germany), Simon Denny (New Zealand), Brian Eno (UK), Charles and Ray Eames (US), Andreas Gursky (Germany), Naeem Mohaiemen (Bangladesh/US), Adrian Paci (Albania), Alex Prager (US), Taryn Simon (US), and What We Found After You Left: A Project by […]
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Gate 1 The empty airport is one of the most haunting and defining images of our time. As the coronavirus response enforced travel bans and closed borders, images of deserted airports have come to hold a set of often wildly contradictory ideas: the fragility of human existence, the failure or success of government responses to […]
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Marco Brambilla, Approach, 1999, video installation, 9mins Marco Brambilla’s Approach has been called ‘a love song to airport voyeurism’,[1] and ‘a kind of action-flick trailer’.[2] It turns a mundane moment of the airport experience—the thrusting of the long-haul traveller back into the world via the arrivals lounge—into a portentous rite of passage with a journey-across-the-River-Styx […]
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John Akomfrah, The Airport, 2016, video installation, 53min UK artist John Akomfrah’s recent films give sprawling, elliptical form to the diasporic experience. They centre on contemporary issues rooted in histories and ideologies of empire, such as environmental destruction, religious persecution, economic collapse, and the refugee crisis. Untethering art’s historical relationship to power, Akomfrah mixes cultural […]
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Ed Atkins, Safe Conduct, 2016, video installation, 9min 4sec, Collection Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Mervyn Horton Bequest Fund and German Foundation Tour 2018 A gross-out parody of airport instructional videos, Safe Conduct loops—violently, ominously, purposefully. Playing out across three video walls, it tracks a man slowly and torturously submitting to airport-security protocols […]
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Harry Culy was four years old when Hiroshi Sugimoto visited Aotearoa in 1990. The Japanese-American photographer made one of his signature seascapes at Napier’s Maraenui Beach, not far from the farm owned by Culy’s grandmother. Culy regularly visited the farm as a child, and now revisits and reimagines these experiences for his project Rose Hill. A […]
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It is not enough for me just to gaze onto the world. —Justine Varga[1] Justine Varga’s use of the latticed window takes us back, right back to the origins of photography, and back to her own recent past—the controversy surrounding her winning the Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture in 2017. Her winning work, Maternal […]
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Photography is ever present in J.G. Ballard’s fiction. Vaughan photographs car crashes as case studies for a new psychopathology in Crash (1973), the tower block’s inhabitants document the social chaos they succumb to in High Rise (1975), while Super-Cannes (2000) chronicles a modern world where surveillance cameras hang ‘like gargoyles’.[1] In The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), […]
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J.G. Ballard was exasperated by David Hockney’s ‘joiner’ photo collages. ‘There is no sense of when the separate photographs were taken’, he wrote. ‘The collages could equally have been shuffled together from cut-up copies of the same snapshot’. Seeing only an affront to perception and photography itself, Ballard insisted that ‘the human eye is not faceted … […]
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LA artist Petra Cortright gives analogue painting a digital upgrade. Her paintings are made entirely in Photoshop, using images, filters, and effects appropriated from Pinterest, Google Images, and other image-generating web sites. She breaks down and reintegrates this amassed material into a virtual palette of tones and textures with which she paints densely-layered, slowly-morphing abstractions. […]
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AARON LISTER 