Installed at Program Your Retroactive Wish, Catalyst Arts, Belfast, 2018
‘the sun, its turned… Its like vomit’ 2018
video, audio, objects.
An object consisting of 3 video channels, 2 audio channels and various rack mounted elements. These include poorly animated 3D models of specific modernist ideas: automotive transport, wireless communication and architecture.
The soundtrack is from a micro-cassette, found in a Dictaphone. It appears to be a report on King Lear, focussing on the religious imagery in the Play.
The written quotes in the videos are from Quatermass (1979), wherein left and right wing gangs battle with a private police force and wondering hippies as the youth of the world is being obliterated by giant space lasers.
the sun is turned (edit)
Although the piece is designed to be seen on three screens simultaneously (as above), this is an edit to show the videos easily here.
The piece was designed to be exhibited with 4 A1 prints on Corriboard, which are also referenced in the videos.
Mercedes Benz
Workers from eastern Europe and prisoners of war were interned in barrack camps with poor, prison-like conditions. Concentration camp detainees were monitored by the SS under inhumane conditions. They were “loaned out” to companies in exchange for money. In 1944, almost half of Daimler Benz’s 63,610 employees were civilian forced labourers, prisoners of war or concentration camp detainees.
Politika
The home of the oldest daily newspaper in Serbia and a monument to Yugoslav modernism, the Politika tower was built in 1967 by architects Ugljesa Bogunovic and Slobodan Janic.
Radar
The DEW Line was a network of radar stations stretching from the Arctic region of Canada and the Aleutian Islands of Alaska to Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands of Northern Europe. A joint project of the US and Canada, the DEW Line was rapidly constructed in response to the threat posed by Soviet bombers and became a cornerstone of the Colorado-based North American Aerospace Defence Command.
Red Star
The five-pointed red star has often served as a symbol of communism. One interpretation sees the five points as representing the five fingers of the worker's hand, as well as the five continents. A lesser-known suggestion is that the five points on the star were intended to represent the five social groups that would lead Russia to communism: the youth, the military, the industrial labourers, the agricultural workers or peasantry and the intelligentsia.
SR-71 Blackbird
The SR-71 a long-range, Mach 3+, strategic reconnaissance aircraft, operated at high speeds and altitudes to allow it to outrace threats. If a surface-to-air missile launch were detected, the standard evasive action was simply to accelerate and outfly the missile.