t heS U S P E N S I O N o f

H I S T O R Y

Michal Baror

Joanna Piot rowska

Beth Atk inson

Pat r ick Hough

El i sabeth Mol in

A folksong sung in the midst of a forest. The fragment-face of a stone (or plaster?) figurine. A once-cultivated tree flowering now in wilderness. Another figurine, a tiny mass-produced souvenir Venus, placed in an empty museum niche. A selection of ancient objects, curiously convincing and suspect at once.

What am I to make of this inventory? Evocative objects all, both as new images, fresh artefacts of the present, and in terms of the prior objects, histories they picture, re-present, re-invent.

What the five young artists in this exhibition have in common is not only an interest in history and how its remnants persist in the present, but an involvement in the process of picturing as a staging or re-enactment of their chosen histories.

Through the performance of picturing, something from the past is not simply discovered or rediscovered, but is articulated, re-lived in a certain way. The object, the artefact is never simply objective, nor mere fact. Any fact requires a telling, and telling

– whether a picture or story – is never disinterested; there is always a particular perspective, one angle rather than another. Things may be seen in one light or another, and so be liable to shade into fiction, or take on a personal, cultural or political colouration.

Histories, like pictures, are made, not given, and the processes, criteria and contexts of their making are central in their formation. It is perhaps useful that in some languages, the word for history and story is the same, histoire in French, storia in Italian. This may help in avoiding an assumption that fact and fiction are easily distinguished, and make us mindful of who is telling - who speaks, and who is silenced.

Whether historian or artist, or something of both, a consciousness of one’s methods is fundamental. Some methods might also be shared by other diggers and delvers into the past - the archaeologist, anthropologist, or psychoanalyst. Identifying and returning to a significant site or moment, looking for repeated patterns, or conversely recognising something indicative through its uniqueness, sorting indifferent material from a telling remnant - these strategies are not only means of discovery, but also, in a sense, the

“making” of their object.

SUSAN BUTLER FACTS, ARTEFACTS, FICTIONS

Then description, interpretation, framing – in words or pictures – is needed to make the material in question intelligible to others. But in addition, for the artist, experimentation at every stage is key: trying things out in varied ways, observing results and replaying, re-enacting, engaging chance and process to produce something that could not otherwise be discovered. Or made.

The strategies, contexts and tone of each body of work here is inflected by each artist’s individual concerns. Beth Atkinson’s is the most personal, in its use of a preexisting refrain that gives voice to remembered loss and lostness, in a forest at once real and metaphorical. Joanna Piotrowska’s beautiful images of fruit trees in flower assume an unexpectedly poignant note combined with a spare, understated text relating to the political dimension of their history. Michal Bar-Or, Elisabeth Molin and Patrick Hough all query in different ways the machinations of the great cultural engines of historical representation, official and unofficial - the archive, monumental sculpture and museum, and the film industry respectively.

Theirs is a shared inquiry, from differing standpoints, into what something from the past can mean, or fails to mean, now, framed in the contemporary media of photography and moving image. Yet these media and their relatively young histories are part of the inquiry, too, as prime generators of facts, artefacts, fictions.

STEPHANIE HOUGH

THE EVER-PRESENT PAST

There is more poetry, more that is accidental; in a single tree which has endured the years and the seasons, than in the entire façade of a palace. One must ruin a palace to make it an object of interest.

Diderot (1767)

The Suspension of History brings together the work of five artists currently studying at the Royal College of Art, London, MA Photography. This exhibition signals a topical and timely moment of reflection on the nature of “history” and by extension certain moments of disjuncture, intersection and rupture between past and present. History is a highly charged and mystifying subject matter, often presented as a moral certainty but in reality mercurial and plagued by inconsistencies. Similar conflicts beset photography and as a medium it is, by its very nature, transfixed by time. How does the “image” affect our definition or understanding of the past in relation to the present?

The past can be recalled as fragmentations of theatrical scenes, taking place within a decentralised theatre of reception; a mechanism by which to filter information and ultimately deal with trauma. Our personal and collective consciousness is concerned with rebuilding the stratum of societal “ruin” as we are infinitely preoccupied with the reconciliation of past events as a desire to move forward. In order to move forward we must look back and herein lies the crux of interpretation; a mythologising occurs with a re-telling, bound by the impotence of expression and the frustration of our inevitable ruination. This exhibition enacts the idea of history not as a solidified document or fact but

as a possible fiction; something mutable and transformative within the broader account of the human condition. These artists are pushing and pulling at the sub-structural fabric of society and the discarded debris of our “ruin”. Today more than ever, consciousness now resides in parallel dimensions due to the omnipresense of images. As a result, perceptually the distance between past and present has become almost inseparable, as if history itself has become suspended. For this reason the subject of history is now once again relevant and this exhibition attempts to re-engage our current perceptions of our meta-history with relation to the image. A consideration occurs of a “history” or “histories” not presented as a linear account of a past that is extrinsic to the present, but as something that can exist contemporaneously. We must now be prepared to enter a suspension of what was once thought incredulous, in order to embrace the agency of our ever- present past.

It was a late spring afternoon when my mother and I trekked out with bags of recording equipment, a thermos of tea and a packed lunch into Epping Forest. She was recovering from a cold that had scratched at her vocal chords and left her shivering indoors. We found a spot to set up and, despite the biting wind and soaking leaves underfoot, we began to record a folk song. This song, known as Bushes and Briars, was collected from a nearby town around 1903 by Vaughan Williams from a labourer named Charles Potipher. Its repetitious refrain tells a story of two people walking through a forest. By chance, one overhears and eavesdrops on the other – a solitary woman talking to herself about anxiety, loss and secret love.

Folk music is a form of narrative, a way to remember and re-tell significant events (personally or socially) through a fiction often grounded in fact; it is a history-telling. Passed down by memory and repetition rather than through the written word, the story evolves, taking on new significance, new characters and new emphasis as culture shifts and times change. There is no authentic or original version; each version’s meaning is mediated by each individual singer, their location and their life.

To repeat and perform a folk song is at once to engage with the history of its telling and re-telling as well as to take part in its adaptation and evolution where meaning is altered according to the new context of its performance. So what new context is present in my mother’s singing of melody and harmony in Epping Forest?

Like any large and ancient forest, Epping Forest is saturated with stories and folklore – it has been the setting for occultish acts, bloody battles and criminal hideouts as well as countless doomed love affairs. I wanted to re-appropriate the song Bushes and Briars as part of my own storytelling. Namely, that of the poet John Clare’s escape from an asylum in the centre of the forest and subsequent walk home - and my own grandmother, Iris Lilian’s near-identical escape a hundred and thirty years later. The repetition of their personal histories feels to me like two parts of the same song.

My mother and grandmother grew up on the edge of this forest. The land itself took on a form of madness – a split personality; it has been a threat and a refuge. The forest in this instance brings to mind Freud’s Uncanny, an idea rooted in the semantic circle of heimlich and unheimlich with their overlapping meanings of familiarity and secrets, the threatening unknown and the threatening revelation. So, just as we eavesdrop on my mother singing about a revealed secret melancholy (you in the gallery, I behind the camera), I remember the paths of John Clare and Iris Lilian; their repeated stories and actions in the same area of land. For me, they are the two characters walking in Bushes and Briars. Outside of time and history, they repeat each other’s actions, eavesdropping on each other’s madness and melancholy.

The piece is titled Fugue – another word loaded with a dual meaning. A fugue is a compositional technique for two (or more) voices that repeats itself throughout a piece of music. It is not so much “call and response” but a doubling or mirroring within a composition. It is also a psychiatric disorder involving a sudden loss of memory and identity and an unplanned walking, an escaping and running away. Its etymological roots stems from the Latin; fugere – to flee.

Through folksong, the forest landscape becomes a site for uncanny doubling, a mirror for memory and a theatrical setting for stories that repeat, evolve and repeat once more, with new significance time and time again.

BETH ATKINSON HISTORY-TELLING

MICHAL BAROR WORKS FROM THE "PALESTINE EXPLORATION FUND" ARCHIVE

As someone who received her edification in the Israeli-Zionist system , there was no place called Palestine. There were only Palestinians who were living in the territory of what the Israeli mainstream called “Yehuda, Shomron and Gaza”, the same area known to the rest of the world as the “Occupied Territories”. The Zionist (the Jewish national movement) history of the land — the history that we were taught in school — created a divided timeline that refers only to the periods where Jews were in control of the land. This history began in biblical times, around Thirteenth Century BC and until First Century CE when the Roman legions under Titus destroyed much of Jerusalem and the Second Temple. Then history stops for almost two thousand years, until the Zionists were awakened with a call for all the Jews of the world to come and reoccupy the land of Israel under the slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land”.

As I grew up and became more politically aware, I realised that the same land that we usually refer to as the land of Israel, was in fact called “Palestine” until the establishment of Israel in 1948. Moreover, at the time Israel as we now know it, was established, this land was populated with hundreds of Palestinian settlement cities and villages. Since the war of 1948 (this event is known by the Israeli narrative as the “Independent War”, and by Palestinian narrative as the “Nakba”meaning “day of the catastrophe”) these same people are refugees in the Occupied Territories and all around the world.

This new awareness was, for me, followed up by questions about the politics of history writing and the limits of vision that are forced upon a subject from its historical and geographical settings. My relocation to London opened up an ability to look at my own place from a different angle, one that is rather exterior, or as exterior as possible, when considering the fact that we are all hostages of our native culture.

Within London, I decided to search for a different colonial view on Palestine in order to figure out something about the Zionist one, which I know by heart. The work that I present here was all taken from the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) archive; the first organisation that was established specifically for the study of Palestine in 1865. Located in London city centre since 1901, the archive contains archaeological objects, ethnographical objects, natural history objects, photographs, and maps.

In visiting this archive, I’m doing the opposite journey from these British scholars, If they were coming to Palestine as foreigners in order to dig after information about their own imaginative holy place, then I am digging into their archive in order to review my own concentric place through foreign eyes. If they are trying to build a safe structure of knowledge, to cover the holes and give answers, I am jumping from one lack of knowledge to another in order to cover the distance between the imaginative and real. These politically-loaded objects undertook the same journey as me, from the land of Palestine to England, only in a completely different period of time, before there was any national movements in the area. Maybe through them I can find a new root to my own identity and my own relation to the place and to understand a bit better my dual relation to my motherland, as both a daughter of colonialists (Jewish Zionists) and a native (as I don't really know any other home).

Why do I go back to the archives of Palestine?

ended with a count of houses, multiplicity poured into an arid singularity, number; she ended with a reference to history proper, textbook history.

3.The sentimental journey, the private rite of the forefathers that the artist performed, dedicated as it was to individual beings, leads to a generalisation from which one doesn’t dare derive the fate of a single individual. There are no more people. The houses are gutted, burned. Only plant life remains, and it blossoms in spite of the catastrophe. The pictures comprising 5128 depict - it would seem - the untamed natural environment of the Bieszczady, lacking - apparently - human presence. But if we look at these photographs a bit more carefully, we plainly see that they depict blossoming fruit trees. What might seem at first glance to have arisen from untamed nature is in reality an overgrown orchard. Stones, boards, panes of glass and settlers have disappeared. Only the orchards remain, and these look after themselves.

Piotrowska meticulously hunts down echoes of beings, tracks covered over. She refutes the one-zero interpretation: it was - it isn’t. She portrays far-off reflections of existence, the elliptical presence of humans in places where (it would seem) they have never been. (How quickly nature reclaims abandoned settlements, how unceremoniously it reduces them to rubble). From an intimate impulse (this is why knowledge of the circumstances of creation was important) a cycle was created on what transcends the individual.

4.Once, in a different country, I happened to visit another landscape that had changed beyond recognition. The people spoke a different language than I recalled, (because the border had been moved, and was now part of a different country). And there, where a forest had once stood, yawned a void. The hills had disappeared, because they had been used to make highway gravel. The paths were overgrown, and new ones had appeared. Of the house, the goal of that pilgrimage, there remained only a single stone and a shrub - now nothing more than an ordinary bush amid the burdocks, nondescript, covered with dust, although it had been carried there from afar at the turn of the previous century and cherished through the years.

5128 depicts this same story, and all those like it. Joanna Piotrowksa explores and passes on this story with delicacy and feeling.

JOANNA PIOTROWSKA 5128

1.Joanna Piotrowska noted how the spark appeared; later - much later - the spark was to become a long-term project. The spark, that is, the memory of an image: the contours of a house that no longer exists, punctuated by roses grown wild, framed by emptiness. For now, only this and nothing more: an overgrown bush spotted during a trip to the countryside. What had been built for shelter, built to last, a house, disappeared without a trace, as if a bomb had gone off, the kind of bomb that vaporises people and animals in seconds, and leaves no trace. What was intended as decoration, as a fleeting fioritura of no importance to the house’s primary function, is now the sole remaining trace. We are entering here into the realm of apparent contradictions, of paradoxes presented in photographic form. Roses instead of a house - as if the moss were to outlive the rock it overgrew. In the eyes of the photographer, in my eyes, a re-evaluation of the concept of intransience has taken place; but she is not yet aware of this. She concludes her trip and returns home.

2.When I look at finished works (or at least those that have achieved a certain stage of completion), knowledge of the spark, of the point of departure, seems unnecessary. Yet I follow its trail nevertheless, because it is always more interesting to follow the artist — if only a few steps, if only to see whether the artist isn’t taking a wrong turn (after all, artists aren’t infallible).

Two years ago, Piotrowska, accompanied by her aunt, drove to the village of Bartoszowiny, in order to visit the former home of her great-grandparents. Upon arriving, they found that the house no longer existed, that it had been stripped to the last board. And so here we have a moment of privacy unveiled, an intimate moment, the little history of a certain family; a history inaccessible from outside, intended only for the initiated.

Ultimately, she chose another part of Poland, the Bieszczady looking there for these kind of places. She took the title 5128 for her project, or - as she puts it - the total number of houses that existed in the Bieszczady before commencement of the “Vistula” relocation action. Here, then, is the outline, the general direction that Piotrowska followed. From an intimate sign, an overgrown rosebush encircling a cube of space (which had once been a family home, and in front of which Piotrowska’s great-grandparents had once posed - smiling and eternally happy, like all those posing in front of their houses). Yet she

PATRICK HOUGH RUMINATIONS ON HISTORY AND CINEMATIC REPRESENTATION

PALACE - THRONE ROOM - DAY

EMPEROR COMMODUS is standing before a group

of male children and their tutors in his

throne room.

The throne room is still very much the

province of his father. Manuscripts and

astronomical charts and papyrus scrolls and

wax tablets litter the heavy desk. A large

bust of Marcus Aurelius is in one corner.

He moves about the room, pausing before the

bust. A beat. He touches it. As Commodus

speaks he studies it, doesn’t like it, nods

to a slave and the bust is whisked away.

≈

With the proliferation of cinema, and its extensions - television and the internet, theboundaries between the real and the imaginary have become blurred and indistinct. Cinema has penetrated every aspect of our lives and is all around us, its effects expanding far beyond the confines of the theatre and screens. It has replaced painting as the dominant medium for bringing imagined images to the audience, impacting, shaping and altering the way we see the world. Art has always been used to come to terms with and understand our past and cinema is no exception. This is particularly true of incidents in our history that we have a great difficulty in comprehending – the horrors of war and the great inhumanity inflicted by humans upon other humans. The Shoah is one of the most noteworthy examples, represented in many mainstream films such as Schindler’s List (1993), The Pianist (2002) and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008).

However, even today, the discussion of history in cinema is limited to small circles within the broader field of historiography, despite the fact that representing history in visual media has a wide-ranging impact on the way we perceive the world. Historians often dismiss the ‘historical film’, as a mode of signification that is prone to romanticise, trivialise and fictionalise the truth – the people and events within history. They problematise Hollywood’s evolved narrative conventions of compacting history into ordered sequences with a beginning, middle and end in order to make them more commercially viable.

However historian Robert Rosenstone sees some filmic histories as forming part of the strategies enacted by “postmodern history”. These are histories which he claims are “full of small fictions used, at best, to create larger

historical ‘truths,’ truths that can be judged only by examining the extent to which they engage the arguments and ‘truths’ of our existing historical knowledge on any given topic.”

The French Philosopher Jacques Rancière’s assertion that “writing history and writing stories come under the same regime of truth” is useful in addressing these challenges. The ‘regime of truth’ suggested by Rancière is not one that sees the ‘mimetic reproduction’ of reality as its aim, but rather as a plane wherebalance can be found between facts and fictions, where both can be equally valid in providing an understanding of the past.

≈

With this in mind, I am interested in the film prop as a model for thinking about how we construct the past in the present. I also wonder if there is a possibility for these objects to become historical artefacts in their own right, outside of the constraints and category of ‘the history of Hollywood’ which might see them relegated to a specific style of museological display about film history, thereby diminishing their power and neutralising any other method of thinking around them.

Film props, by their very nature are imbued with a multiplicity of times, narratives and histories rendering them more implicit as objects than a simple device as part of a cinematic process. They demand further exploration, thought and engagement. In a way, they are more charged than the original artefact archetype they seek to represent, far more complex and mysterious.

Every historical prop conceived has a duality in its own history as an object. On the one hand there is the history that is being represented, and on the other is the history of the prop itself. The represented history can either be precise, specific and tied to a time and a place, or a general historical archetype, an object that triggers entire centuries of civilisation so we as an audience know what setting we are being placed into. The history of the individual prop itself is interesting to look at alongside this as these props are often used and reused in countless film productions, bought and sold, hired and rented. Each time the object forms part of a new production it perhaps absorbs some of that history and, in so doing, the past is all at once shattered and remade anew.

When I entered the museum I found a team of scientists measuring up every millimetre of every statue, every plinth and every arch. Someone had found a new mathematic theory on the Golden Ratio that was crucial to test out. Height: 5’4” Head: 23” Neck: 12.5” Chest: 33” Bust: 37” Waist: 26” Hips: 38” Thigh: 22.5” Calf: 13.2” Ankle: 7.4” Knee: 15”. Seeing it and naming it. They had removed some of the artworks where the calculations were incoherent or Non Finito, so spaces and plinth were left empty. I went to the museum shop where I found pictures of the objects and reproductions of artworks. I found a hollow miniature, a Venus de Milo, a copy of a copy of a copy. It was small enough to fit into my pocket. The packaging said it was made in China, in a factory where the suicide rate of the workers is high but doesn’t exceed the national rate. I went back to one of thew empty spaces and sat the miniature on a plinth underneath an arch. Despite the disproportion and lack of scale she blended in like a chameleon. As a little fiction in this space, as a juxtaposition of conflicting ideologies, she sat surrounded by monumental figures in artificial lighting and thick air.

the gap between the hidden and the remainder that is present

When I arrived the palace was wrapped in a giant postcard picture of the palace, underneath it scaffolding was sticking out. The golden gate was shut but the guards were asleep so I walked in. I got lost looking for the gardens but found an audio guide that directed me to a temporary wall with a geometric garden printed on it. I pulled a handle and walked in. Despite the perfectly cut triangle trees that don’t grow, every object I found was covered in green cloth. The Water Walk: Jesus, Mexican Alebrijes, Patch-work woman, Beheaded officer. The Saturn Walk: Stone age dress, Mama Vertiformis, Spray can, Ballerina. The Royal Walk: Prune, Wolf, Egyptian bas relief, The shadow of a shadow. Like a constant negotiating between the mind and the monument, the fiction and the real.

ELISABETH MOLIN COPY AND UNDO

B P S

Published on the occasion of the exhibition:

The Suspension of HistoryBasement Project Space, Camden Quay, Cork City, Ireland. 7th -16th of June 2012.

The Suspension of History has been made possible by the generous support of Basement Project Space, Cork and the Royal College of Art, London.

With special thanks to:

Curatorial Advisor: Peggy Sue Amison Artistic Director of Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh.

BPS Directors & Curatorial Team: Lorraine McDonnell, Anthony Kelly, Stephanie Hough.

All the Royal College of Art Staff, especially: Susan Butler, Dr. Paul Thompson, Hermione Wiltshire, Claire Smithson.

Kindly sponsored by:

Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London.

J.J. Hough’s Singing Pub, Main Street, Banagher, Co. Offaly.

Edition of 300

To contact any of the participating artists:

Beth Atkinsonbeth.atkinson@network.rca.ac.uk

Joanna Piotrowskajoanna.piotrowska@network.rca.ac.uk

Michal Bar-Ormichal.bar@network.rca.ac.uk

Elisabeth Molinelisabeth.molin@network.rca.ac.uk

Patrick Houghpatrick.hough@network.rca.ac.uk

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All images courtesy of the artists.

© 2012, Basement Project Space, the artists, photographers, designer and authors. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner without prior permission.

Basement Project Space, Camden Quay, Cork City, Ireland.basementprojectspace@gmail.comwww.basementprojectspace.wordpress.com