artists at work

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.

population exchanges

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.