Grief and loss and difference are contemporary realities shared
across societies and cultures worldwide. “Chronicles of a Disappearance”, a new
exhibition at DHC/ART in Montreal, explores these difficult issues through the
work of international artists Phillipe Parreno, Taryn Simon, Teresa Margolles,
Omer Fast and Jose Toirac as each provides a view into abscence and
disappearance as subject. All five of these acclaimed artists, in making the
gaps in existence tangible, challenge the viewer to engage with their own state
of being as reflected by a lack of something else.
Taryn Simon, a New York photo-based artist, in her An American Index of the Hidden and
Unfamiliar, presents a series of stunningly shot photographs of worlds
hidden and marginalized within American society. Enigmatic stills of deformed
show animals, nuclear waste storage sites, CIA art collections and death row
exercise yards are paired with dense and detailed text panels illuminating the
images. The small print text requires an intimate closeness for most viewers,
implicating us in the content and forcing an identification with either the
marginalized or the power base. These hidden places and stories, integral to
the function and dysfunction of American society, are unknown and unseeable but
through the artist’s lens.
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Nuclear Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility
Cherenkov Radiation, Hanford Site, U.S. Department of Energy
Southeastern Washington State
Submerged in a pool of water at Hanford Site are 1,936 stainless-steel nuclear-waste
capsules containing cesium and strontium. Combined, they contain over 120 million
curies of radioactivity. It is estimated to be the most curies under one
roof in the United States. The blue glow is created by the Cherenkov Effect
which describes the electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle,
giving off energy, moves faster than light through a transparent medium.
The temperatures of the capsules are as high as 330 degrees Fahrenheit.
The pool of water serves as a shield against radiation; a human standing one foot
from an unshielded capsule would receive a lethal dose of radiation in less than 10 seconds.
Hanford is among the most contaminated sites in the United States.
Chromogenic print, 37-1/4 x 44-1/2 inches framed (94.6 x 113 cm), Edition of 7
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Fidel Castro, long-lived and long-winded orator and leader of
Cuba’s recent history is known for speeches lasting up to 9 hours. In Opus,
Havana-based Jose Toirac has taken his fiery and impassioned tracts, edited out
all content but a litany of numbers and compressed the audio recording to a
cryptic speech and video list of numerals about what? Perhaps these represent
the cuban refugees who make up part of the American population, or the number
of foes, or the successes of the state, or the deaths of valiant heroes of
revolution – there are no clues to the hidden content about which this leader
is so passionate.
Showing concurrently at DHC/ART and Ottawa’s National Gallery is
Berlin-based Omer Fast’s 50,000 Feet is
the Best, a looping Groundhog Day of film edits from real and re-enacted
interviews in and around a Las Vegas hotel room. The viewer is led through a
series of vignettes via the questioning of an unseen interviewer as a man
explains his experiences operating a Predator Drone against targets in Pakistan
and Afghanistan from his base in the desert of America’s west. Clearly affected
by the remote game-like attacks that have difficulty differentiating military
from civilian targets, the pilot stutters and stumbles from one horror to the
next alternating between anger, detachment, and palpable remorse. His nerves
uncalmed by the contents of an unknowable pill bottle, the viewer is repeatedly
shaken by
Another video based work, Phillipe Parreno’s engaging reenactment
of the final journey of Robert Kennedy’s corpse from New York to Washinton in June 8, 1968, shows the Senator’s view of a country in grieving not only for
him but for the hope he represented. Long sweeping shots of mourners in urban
and country settings pit the gallery viewer’s gaze with those who experiencing
loss and pain. The massive projection of 70mm film leaves us humbled by the
emotion portrayed, the gravity of the journey, and the import of the event.
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| June 8, 1968 Phillip Parreno Installation View from DHC/ART |
Plancha is a startling
work by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles that lulls the viewer with its form
reminiscent of minimalist sculpture in iron and stone. Within the large
gallery, a long line of oxidizing steel is heated by hidden elements and rests
underneath a trough slowly dripping water along the slab’s length. The water
measures time in this space as it does when slowly leaking from an old faucet,
but in DHC/ART the ‘bloop’ echoing in our insomniac brain has become a sharp
audible hiss as the droplet immediately evaporates into the room on hitting the
hot metal, a whitish residue forming on te plate surface. When one learns, via
the whispers of other visitors and the nearby text panel, that Margolles has
collected this water from her previous workplace, a morgue, where the liquid
had been used to wash bodies, the sounds and heat and smells in the room become
far more sinister. The viewer becomes complicit in the processing of death in a
country, far away, where the usually young and often anonymous corpses pay
silent witnesses to a society rife with drugs, violence and social inequity.
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| Plancha - Installation and detail views from DHC/ART |
In an alcove, next to Plancha,
Taryn Simon has a final work, isolated and dead-ended by an astute and fearless
curatorial team. Zarah/Farah is a
devastating staged photograph based on recent real events staining American
military history. This image, created for the final frame of Brian DePalma’s
film Redacted, shows the actress Zahra Zubaidi playing the role of Farah, a
character based on the 14 year old Iraqi girl Abeer Qasim Hamza. Four American
soldiers of the 502nd Infantry Regiment have been convicted of gang rape of the
child Hamza outside Mahmudiya, during which time her parents and six year old
sister were being murdered. After the rape, Hamza was shot in the head and her
body set on fire. The Iraqi actress Zubaidi has, since the film, sought and
attained political asylum due to death threats from family and criticism from
friends and neighbors for her portrayal of the 14 year old victim, a role they
consider to be pornography. No matter how one is affected by this horrifying
fiction of a more horrific reality, once seen the viewer has no choice but to
re-enter the overly warm and cloying mortuary, and breathe molecules of the
departed before being released into the everyday, undoubtedly changed.
I left the exhibition “Chronicles of a Disappearance” battered
and shaken. Face to face with reminders of the disappeared, the forgotten, and
the lost we are forced to reconcile our horror with realization that this is
the reality that we live in. This is not easy art, and that is high praise
indeed. The greatest role of art, in my opinion, is to reflect society back on
itself for processing and consideration; to evoke emotion and thought and
discussion; to be incapable of being ignored. This exhibition hits on all counts.
It has been my great pleasure to visit DHC/ART for several
amazing shows over the past few years and I stand in awe of this institution
and her curatorial staff who are seemingly fearless. Jenny Holzer, Guido Van
der Werve, Berlinde de Bruyckere, Sophie Calle, John Currin, Tehching Hsieh,
Eija-Liisa Ahtila have all shown in recent years. Amazing artists, many
exploding onto the international stage after being programmed here, these are
not household names but ‘artist’s artists’. These are the controversial and
influential leaders in contemporary visual culture. I am adamant that, while Montreal is always worth visiting,
DHC/Art is reason alone to make
the journey and is in itself a national treasure.
