ART-PRESENTATION: Groundwork

Groundwork is an extended season of exhibitions, events and activities, bringing challenging and ambitious contemporary art in different locations of Cornwall, a semi-rural region of south west England. It has been conceived as an unfolding program, focusing on artists’ work in moving image, sound, action and performance, and involving exceptional locations in west and central Cornwall.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Groundwork Archive

The title of the project “Groundwork” refers both to the laying of foundations for the future and to the exploration of place as a terrain of past and present human activity. The program draws connections between Cornwall’s geological, industrial, social and cultural histories and related narratives from elsewhere in the world. “Groundwork” starts with two new commissions:  In the gallery at Kestle Barton, is on presentation the film “Bella, Maia and Nick (From nothing to something to something else, Part I)” by Manon de Boer. Filmed at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, the work portrays three local music students experimenting with new sounds and rhythms. Made with de Boer’s characteristic quality of quiet attention, the film has grown out of her continuing fascination with the importance of ‘open time’ in creating the conditions for invention and creation. Following research at Goonhilly Earth Station, the large telecommunications site first established on the Lizard peninsula in the early 1960s, Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) have developed a new moving image work that explores how we experience nature through the language of science and technology. Seen through the shifting reflections of a fictional elderly female scientist, the film combines new video footage filmed at Goonhilly Earth Station, archival material, and scientific data acquired through the process of radio astronomy. Semiconductor’s work is shown with Simon Starling’s film “Black Drop” (2012) inspired by the 2012 transit of Venus. “Black Drop” tells the story of the relationship between astronomy, photography and the beginnings of moving image technology, starting with the idea that the 2012 transit may be the last to be recorded on celluloid. Francis Alÿs’ film “The Silence of Ani” (2015) was shot on location in an ancient Armenian city near the border with Turkey, where the quiet of a ruined city is broken by birdsong. In the breathtaking and uncanny scenery of the valley of Ani children play duduks (ancient double-reed woodwind flutes) in a game of hide and seek. Their calls become both a ballad for the future and an elegy to the past. As the children approach one another, the mood darkens and the work speaks of the residue of trauma in a region remembering the genocide that took place a century ago. The film concludes as the children get tired and fall asleep on what is left of Ani, waiting to be woken anew. Tacita Dean’s 16mm film “Event for a Stage” (2015) will be presented from 31/5 to 3/6 at Falmouth University’s performing arts centre, AMATA. Originally commissioned as a live performance over four consecutive nights for the 2014 Sydney Biennial, it was Dean’s first foray into theatre and her first experience of working with an actor. What resulted was a fierce interplay between the artist and the actor Stephen Dillane as they struggled to understand and accommodate each other’s disciplines. Dean filmed each of the four nights as part of the performance and reworked the footage to explore the interplay between reality and fiction that theatre is built around. Steve McQueen’s film “Gravesend” is concerned with the mining of coltan, a dull black mineral used in capacitors, which are vital components in mobile phones, laptops, and other electronics. Juxtaposing an animated fly-by of the Congo River with footage of workers sifting through dark earth and robots processing the procured material in a pristine, brightly lit laboratory, the film’s disjunctions allegorise the very real economic, social and physical distance this material traverses as it moves from the third to the first world. Its final sequence, a time-lapse shot of a sun setting behind smokestacks, brings everything full circle, rendering visual a scene described at the outset of Joseph Conrad’s novel, “Heart of Darkness”. “Unexploded” (2007) shown on a nearby monitor, is a minute-long film made by McQueen when he was sent to Iraq as a war artist and filmed from multiple perspectives a crater left by an unexploded bomb in a building in Basra. Sean Lynch’s ongoing video work “What Is An Apparatus” (2016- ) gradually reveals the evidence of increasingly technocratic living through seemingly random encounters with nuclear submarines, postmodern architecture, robots, scrap yards and supermarkets in Europe and North America. Including new footage shot in Cornwall, the work is presented in Helston Museum amongst artefacts relating to the town’s history. “Latoon” (2006-15) focuses on the story of a whitethorn bush in Ireland and folklorist Eddie Lenihan, who successfully campaigned to have a motorway redirected in order to save the bush, which he claims is an important meeting place for belligerent fairies of the region. Steve Rowell’s photographic project “Points of Presence”, focuses on the history of 19th and 20th century transatlantic communication technologies. The title refers to the technical term for a physical access point to the Internet. At the heart of Rowell’s investigative project is the very materiality of something as ‘virtual’ as the World Wide Web. This photographic journey captures sites on either side of the North Atlantic where submarine telegraph and telephone cables emerge from the ocean floor.

Participating artists: Francis Alÿs, Manon de Boer, Janet Cardiff, Adam Chodzko, Tacita Dean, Chris Fite Wassilak & Sophie Mallett, Naomi Frears, Andy Holden, Rosemary Lee, Sean Lynch, Christina Mackie, Steve McQueen, Steven Rowell, Simon Starling, Semiconductor, Laureana Toledo and others

Info: Groundwork-A programme of international contemporary art in Cornwall, Project Director: Teresa Gleadowe, Various locations, Cornwall, Duration: 5/5-30/9/18, http://groundwork.art