One of the predominant themes amongst the artists, perhaps inevitably, was the weight that politics and history has on our perception of specific spaces. Amongst the most striking pieces was a series of images by American photographer Taryn Simon. Her interiors of Fidel Castro’s Palace of the Revolution in Havanna were placed next to night shots of a checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah on the West Bank and a seismograph in Indonesia. Similarly, collaborating with the scientific research laboratory Osservatorio Vesuviano in Naples, Rosa Barba creates a fictional documentary including surveillance cameras, seismographs and early archival material of Naples by the Lumière Brothers.
Western colonialism often emerges in the flickering images of Paul Sietsema’s 16 mm films and here, his film Analyse d´une épave traces a shipwreck, capturing its ruins on celluloid like timeless sculptures of a lost cultural memory.
Andreas Hofer´s work overlaps science fiction, scientific research and popular culture. His expansive multi-media installation taking its lead from J.G Ballard’s sci-fi novel Concrete Island, Robert and Matt Maitland offers an opportunity to access to the notion of the artist as a comic adventurer, the creator of a new landscape.
However, for all the gallery’s interest and topical content, a collection of relevant and interesting artists, as an exhibition the emphasis – and almost pressure – of interpreting the symbolism and imagining the places and spectacles of these wildly varying places was great. The interest in art and architecture and literature to place will only intensify over the coming years, particularly with geo-tagging, satellite mapping. This isn’t the first or last show where we will be asked to rethink location nor will it be the best. Beatrice Galilee
