Dance
Category: Photo
Eponymous
Deadhead
…possible addition to the Looking Down project…?
You Were Always on My Mind
Bus View
Wave
Greetings, Citizens of the New Magicians of the Queens
This is a Google translation – I was unable to do better with other online translation services but I feel like the noviomagorum is being translated in an non-idiomatic way… and not how you expect to be greeted for pizza.
Mural / Window
I liked how the red car, the blue sky, and the white wall outside reflected the mural inside.
Window
Cowboy
Jann Haworth [b. 1942]Cowboy1964Kapok and unbleached calicoWilson Gift through Art Fund (2006)
“The American cowboy is an enduring motif in “Hollywood films, which has in recent years been reconsidered through a more contemporary lens, raising issues of gender, identity and social history. Jann Haworth recalls seeing her first rodeo in 1956 and, for her, the rodeo cowboy is a 'fossil of the imperfect/perfect Great American Myth! Cowboy is one of her earliest soft-sculpture figures, depicting a macho subject in a material commonly perceived as feminine.
Rana Begum, No. 1367 Mesh
I first saw this backlit, as you see here, and didn’t think much of it, but as I progressed through the museum, catching views of it from different angles and in different light, I kept seeing new pictures of it.
No Flies on Me
Bell Tower
Cathedral
One of these things is not the same
Green and Glasses
Upon opening my eyes in the morning I’m usually confronted by my glasses sitting on a bedside table, frequently with morning light streaming through the blinds and I’ve posted several monochromatic still lifes taken of that scene. On this occasion, a green of tissues was glowing in the sunlight, creating a green canvas upon which to view the glasses. Slipped out of bed and grabbed the camera, mounting a 60mm macro lens, to get this shot.
Love’s End?
Last month we went to see the big Tracey Emin retrospective at the Royal Academy. The best work, for my taste, were the large paintings from her latest period, which she considers a kind of rebirth. For me, the earlier work was very much like reading a teenage girl’s private diary, full of adolescent anger at people who “just don’t understand me,” and extremely narcissistic (to be fair, private diaries probably are all mostly narcissistic, albeit not often shared publicly). I took a lot of pictures – here they all are in roughly reverse chronological order (click on any one of them to see them all full-sized):
Study for a Monument
ABBAS AKHAVAN
STUDY FOR A MONUMENT
Made in the tradition of funerary monuments, the work commemorates plants instead of people.
– Abbas Akhavan, 2022
Study for a Monument is an ongoing body of work that archives plant species native to the ancient
region of Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in present-day Iraq. Decades of
war and state intervention – such as the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), the First Gulf War (1991) and the
Invasion of Iraq (2003) – have had devastating consequences on the ecology of this area.
Akhavan has hand sculpted and enlarged each plant out of wax then cast them in bronze. The casts,
resembling burnt fragments, are shown on white bed sheets on the ground. They recall pages from
botanical studies, confiscated goods or objects laid out for examination. Akhavan’s choice of material
is significant, as bronze is linked with ancient Mesopotamian weaponry as well as historical
memorials and monuments. The horizontal display on the floor is unlike the traditional vertical
orientation of commemorative sculptures. Instead, it evokes makeshift funerary displays, sites of
mass burial or piles of shrapnel.
The work draws on research that Akhavan has carried out at Kew Gardens in London and at the
Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. Drawing on the botany and history of Iraq, the work reconsiders
monument-making by shifting away from traditions of human-centric memorialisation.
from the Tate Modern placard.
In Search of Vanished Blood
MATERIALS AND OBJECTS 5
NALINI MALANI
Nalini Malani’s ‘video shadow plays’ combine video, shadow and sound to tell multiple stories. In this
work, she creates a tribute to women’s lives forgotten throughout history.
Each cylinder in In Search of Vanished Blood is reverse painted and features images of
dispossessed people, mythological figures and surgical instruments. They cast ominous shadows
which shift across the projections.
The artist draws inspiration from a range of sources. We hear Cassandra, a figure from Greek
mythology who predicts the future but is cursed, so no-one believes her. Referencing texts from
German writers Christa Wolf and Heiner Müller, Indian writer and activist Mahasweta Devi, Irish
author Samuel Beckett, and others, Cassandra anticipates violence against women during periods of
political upheaval. Her story unfolds through stop-motion animations inspired by both historic and
recent wartime atrocities.
The title of the work in Search of Vanished Blood is from the poem Lahu ka Surag 1965 by Pakistani
writer Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Lines from the poem appear over Cassandra’s veiled face. People who have
experienced violence reappear through the endless loops of recurring shadows, creating a sense of
lost hope. The sequence ends with a gesture in American Sign Language that expresses a longing
for democracy.
Malani’s work reflects her commitment to feminist activism. In Search of Vanished Blood amplifies
women’s voices to express Malani’s belief in humanism – the strength of what we have in common
rather than what divides us.
Nalini Malani, In Search of Vanished Blood, 2012-20.
Born 1946, India pre-partition (now Pakistan), works India and the Netherlands
Curated by Beatriz Cifuentes Feliciano.
Assistant Curator, International Art and Jess Baxter, Assistant Curator, International Art
from the Tate Modern information placard
A Fellow of Infinite Jest
