narratives of incompleteness

CULTURE COUP in Aristotle Square, Thessaloniki

2008-09-30T17:42:00.031+01:00

The opening night of CULTURE COUP in Aristotle Square, September 19th.
My piece: FAMILY HISTORIES:

A Steinway grand piano is installed in the centre of Martin Pfeifle's SPLASH for a concert by pianist Maria Gavron.(see below)

Martin Pfeifle inspects FAMILY HISTORIES.

See his SPLASH installation here:

http://www.pfeifle.de/

For more images of the opening night click on this link:
Photoreportage

FAMILY HISTORIES: more images.

The family faced the sea, the mirror faced Aristotle Square.

Leading to FAMILY HISTORIES, a trail of the absent faces: and Christodoulos Mantzaris' poem, in Greek and in English:

aristotle square

2008-09-17T15:35:00.113+01:00

The site for the CULTURE COUP installation is Aristotle Square, which faces the sea.

The artists start to explore the space, to work out where each piece should be placed.
Martin Pfeifle asks for a caravan, to use as his studio in Aristotle Square. The Municipality kindly provides it:

Photograph by Christoph Westermeir.

The artists LOVE their caravan: from left to right, Nicola, Benjamin, Shahar, Martin and Christoph.
Photograph by Christoph Westermeir.

The caravan IS glamorous! Photograph by Martin Pfeifle.

Autumn weather arrives, to delay work:

Caravan interiors...by Christoph Westermeir.

Nicola and Martin.

Shahar Kazara.

All the materials arrive, the caravan fills up and work begins:

As I worked on installing my piece, I was called over by this gentleman (below), one of many sitting on the benches surrounding Aristotle Square, including gypsies and 'illegals' selling DVDs, watching with interest as the artists worked on their mysterious objects.

He asked me for a kiss; and with Shahar translating, told me his name was CHRISTODOULOS MANTZARIS, that he was 96 years old, born 1912 in Istanbul, another survivor of ‘population exchanges’ who left Istanbul for Thessaloniki in 1939. Then he recited a poem he had written long ago, that he said had been broadcast on the BBC:

Give me land without borders, without barriers, without sour lips…

Give me sweet smiles.

Give me sweet smiles...

I work on my piece until the last possible moment: the opening is the next day. As always, adrenalin and anxiety.

The day ends with a celebratory dinner with our sponsors, Shahar Kazara,Thessaloniki's Vice Mayor and others from the Department of Culture:

From left to right: Shahar Kazara, leader of the Thessaloniki Symphony Orchestra, the Vice Mayor.

Benjamin Lee Martin, Martin Pfeifle.

Nicola Lane.

Martin Pfeifle and his Man Fan.

artists at work

2008-09-17T15:35:00.089+01:00

The artists gather in Thessaloniki, to create their work for the CULTURE COUP installation in Aristotle Square, opening on September 19th 2008 as part of the City's annual DIMITRIA FESTIVAL.

Martin Pfeifle, young artist from Düsseldorf: creating SPLASH, a giant installation...

Christoph Westermeir, young artist from Düsseldorf, assistant and partner of Martin.

Benjamin Lee Martin, French/American artist creating a tower constructed from magazines:

Benjamin's hotel room fills with magazines, which he folds and stacks...

Nicola Lane, London-based artist: my first night in the Hotel le Palace, Thessaloniki, my home for 10 days. I have proposed a life-size enlargement of a family group photograph from the Thessaloniki Photographic Museum archives, choosing this one:

The photograph is an icon for those millions of families who leave their land and their culture for a new life; posed against a painted backdrop, painted with the dark clouds of war and battleships from the Macedonian Campaign in which my grandfather Mickey Gallagher served. The faces are to be cut out , as in those painted backgrounds found in fairgrounds and sea-side resorts, where the public play with their identity, and are photographed as strong men, or astronauts, or beauties in bikinis. The public are invited to play with the image.

On the verso of the image will be a mirror, also with the absences of the cut-out faces; the mirror reflects today’s city and its people, but with absences that remind us to question who we are. We reflect on ourselves, on the city.

Shahar Kazara, pictured left, director of Start Direct and creator of CULTURE COUP: organising the time, the place,the money, the fabricators, the bubble wrap, the gaffer tape...pictured with Solon, smoking, drinking coffee, and discussing fabricating my piece.

I go with Shahar and Solon ( above) to inspect my work at the printers. But it has been made too small. I have to install it anyway, as there is not enough time to re-make it before the opening on September 19th. I have to trust that the work's original concept survives this problem.

It is taken to the Municipality's workshop for the supporting frame to be constructed...

Pictured above is YIANNIS NOUSIAS, master carpenter at work .

The Municipality workshop is a graveyard for retired or injured public sculpture:

Shahar contemplates a retired hero's facial hair and the lessons of history.

At the end of the day we retire to drink ouzo beneath this wonderful whirling dervish mobile, in our favourite bar in Thessaloniki's market. Photograph by Christoph Westermeir.

cutting and fragmenting

2008-09-16T10:48:00.010+01:00

Cutting and fragmenting images is a recurring process in my work, informed by my experience of disability and by a peripatetic childhood, living in 7 countries before the age of 15.

I worked with archive photographs for the first time in 2000, in my final piece for Adorn,Equip, Leicester City Gallery’s groundbreaking exhibition about disability equipment. In the Science Museum’s storage building in Olympia, London, I discovered a collection of glass plate photographs taken in 1911 by a prosthetist, a maker of artificial limbs. They show his clients posed in front of a painted backdrop, their clothes carefully arranged to reveal and display their various prostheses.

I digitally cut out the prostheses from the portraits and exhibited them separately, in a series called Beautiful Pictures, as part of my installation called The Aesthetics of Prosthetics.

In the family portraits shown previously, the people gaze outwards, meeting our gaze. In these portraits the subjects hide their faces, or turn away, or avert their eyes.

In Matthew Stone’s Art Salon, we discussed the significance of the intention behind a piece of work. The intention behind the prosthetists's photographs is to advertise his product. The people hide their faces and turn away because the photographs are not portraits of them: the artificial limbs are the subject of the photographs.

Only one of the subjects broke away from this de-personalisation; it is this young man, who turned his head to look at us, at some point during the photograph’s long exposure.

from the archive

2008-09-13T17:38:00.011+01:00

To begin the process of creating the installation, I asked Shahar Kazara to source family group photographs from around 1916 to the 1920s, (when refugees and 'population exchanges' surged through the City), from the archive of Thessaloniki's Museum of Photography.

These beautiful family photographs were selected from the N. Politis Collection, shown here courtesy of the Museum.

population exchanges

2008-09-06T12:33:00.019+01:00

Here is my my family’s link to Thessaloniki: my soldier grandfather, Colonel ‘Mickey’ Gallagher. This tiny photograph, pasted in my Grandmother's album, is labelled as 'Mickey in Gallipoli'. He was part of the British divisions sent to Thessaloniki, I think in September 1916.

He was a professional soldier who fought in the Nigerian Campaign ( where he won the D.S.O.), the Boer War, Gallipoli, the Bulgarian Retreat, and the Battle of the Somme. He was the result of huge ‘population exchanges’, descended from Irish who migrated in the early 1800s from Ireland to India, to find employment in the East India Company, and subsequently like so many Irish, ending up in the British Army fighting on behalf of the British Empire.

All Empires are full of contradictions and paradoxes, and the role of the Roman Catholic Irish in the British Army is one of them.

His father and mother and all his brothers and sisters were born in Hyderebad, India and this nearly cost me my British passport when Margaret Thatcher brought in a new Immigration Bill designed to cull claims for British nationality.

Here is Mickey with my grandmother, my mother and uncle, taken in Cyprus in 1915. My mother was born and brought up in Cyprus, in a cosmopolitan life where Greek and Turkish friends mingled in her parents' house, where she was first married in the Maronite church of Nicosia, and where in 1942, because of fears that Germany would invade Cyprus, she was evacuated with her 2 year old son to Jerusalem, Jaffa, Cairo, and eventually Nairobi, Kenya.

In old family photographs the image is resonant with questions and answers about our identity, our place in the world, and our place within our own communities. We are also looking at absences. My mother, aged 94, is the only one left from this family group.

I reflect on this photograph taken of Mickey on a hillside somewhere in Greece, gazing into a future where I am making art about family photographs.

nicola lane goes to thessaloniki

2008-09-03T15:51:00.016+01:00

Next week I'm flying to Thessaloniki to work on my installation in the main square for the Dimitria Festival. Meanwhile, my friend Shahar Kazara, who is responsible for this wonderful journey, is busy finding fabricators and problem solving...

I've been inspired by Thessaloniki’s ancient and cosmopolitan history, arrivals and departures of cultures and people, and countless histories of migration and emigration.

On the Internet I found a photograph of a Greek immigrant family – the Hios family - taken in Washington DC in 1919.

This made me think about how family photographs represent memories and reinforce identity, how they are used as illustrations of family history, to supply continuity and context. I read that American photographers in the early Twentieth Century made a good living supplying formal studio photographs of immigrant families, of groups, new arrivals and also deaths, to be sent to those remaining in the ‘old country’.

The family group is still a constant in contemporary family photographs, the different generations still posed in the same way. Their gaze is always directed outward at the spectator; but they are gazing at themselves in the future.