Jean Ryan Hakizimana: temporary reprieve
/ upside-down on Lough Neagh (Monday 7 March 2005 #1)
compiled by Elaine Cronin
Two more months for threatened artist
We have recently received a news update on
artist and refugee Jean Ryan Hakizimana (see here
for CIRCA news item) who may face deportation from Ireland if
he does not recieve official refugee status. Hakizimana had
his case review on February 21 last, and has so far been given
a two month extension on his stay. Any further developments
will be posted up as they come in.
Once upon a time, a long long time ago,
where Lough Neagh now sits, was once a great city, and at the
centre of this great city there was once a great spring. Over
time, the spring watched silently while the people of the city
turned to robbing and cheating their neighbours. And eventually
as an apocalyptic punishment upon the people and their sinning
ways, the spring overflowed, drowning the city and all its inhabitants.
The End.
The legends of Lough Neagh give it an automatic
aura of foreboding, a space where neither redemption nor salvation
had its place and where vivid imaginations could run wild over
the depths of its water. And now these legends have become part
of an unusual marriage between science and art (which is apparently
termed 'sciart'), a Frankenstein of sorts if you will, entitled
Landscope.
Landscope contains myriad elements
as far ranging as an upside-down pylon that can pick up electromagnetic
interference, a radio telescope and a camera obscura which,
when combined, somehow bring together the sounds of swarming
eels in the deep waters of the Lough, echoes of distant storms
on Jupiter and recordings of the local people in the area. And
then there's also the upside-down shed to consider. Confused?
Confusing.
Local stories told, strains of music played
and sung, spoken histories or grand legends retold over time
and time again and the dramatic, universal sounds of far distant
places. These are just some of the integral pieces which merge
together as part of this mysterious project by artist Jem Finer,
who also happens to be an ex-Pogue member. For Landscope,
Finer has been working in close collaboration with Paul Moore
and Daniel Jewesbury of the Centre for Media Research (CMR)
at the University of Ulster, which has commissioned this new
piece of work as part of the Vis-onic project.
 |
Artist Jem Finer. Image held here. |
While Finer has been artist-in-residence in
the Astrophysics department of Oxford since October 2003, the
ideas for this project are apparently deep-rooted in childhood
memories.
When I was a young child I used to imagine that
in Australia everything was upside-down, somehow stuck onto
the earth by this thing adults called 'gravity'. Thinking
about this again now it seems obvious that it's true, that
there is no up, nor down. Depending on one's point of view,
one is standing up or hanging on at some peculiar angle. I
started thinking about building a pivot, a fulcrum for the
world, to be viewed standing on one's head, or in a camera
obscura, the image being pinholed upside-down onto the wall.
A sculpture to mark the position of the north and south poles,
the hinges on which the earth spins.
For the project Moore recorded the stories
of those who work and live on Lough Neagh, an area which comes
across as having a rather uneasy undercurrent. Even the houses
on the banks nearby have turned their backs on the water, all
built facing away from the Lough. Small groups of people still
earn a seasonal living from the Lough, waiting for 'the dark',
when the eels which inhabit it migrate, which doesn't sound
very pleasant, whatever it means. And then there's the manner
in which the artist describes the place.
Lough Neagh appears as a blank space, a void
in the Landscape of Northern Ireland. Contrary to expectations
of watery worlds, landlocked and accessible, the Lough isn't
a magnet for recreation or contemplation. The banks are
populated, here and there, with marinas. There are hides
for bird watchers and hides for bird hunters. Jetties can
be found at the bottom of muddy tracks. But the overall
atmosphere is one of foreboding... the opposite bank is
faint and distant, if not invisible behind the horizon or
clouds... (there is) this inability to see across. Perhaps
this is compounded by the knowledge of the eels teeming
below the surface, worming into subconscious. So is the
Lough, while accruing stories, songs and tunes, flowing
in from the tributaries of history, has an aura of singularity,
of a black hole, a point where everything stops, nothing
escapes. A space in the landscape where there opens up an
inversion, the negative space of land.
The installation appeared to emerge mostly
from the dark imagination of its creator, who seems to see this
landscape as the third place, where things never appear as they
should, where everything is quite literally turned on its head,
and no doubt where there are bound to be some very curious passers-by,
who may need to double check the strange sight of an upside-down
pylon and its partner in crime, the upside-down shed.
But the strange sight of Landscope didn't
seem to last very long, as some time after the installation
was put into place on Saturday 12 February, its creators struggled
with unruly weather. Eventually the strong gales coming off
the Lough knocked down the antenna and made the 'camera obscura'
unsafe to enter, and so ended Landscope. But while Landscope
is dead, our friend the upside-down shed will continue the dream
for another while at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast. Is it
that this crazy upside-down world is just not meant to be? Or
perhaps our apocalyptic spring is back in business...
Sources: The
Guardian; University
of Ulster; Vis-onic.
Most recent news items:
• Art: feel the squeeze (Monday 28 February 2005)
• Sinéad under the hammer for 15k (Thursday 24 February 2005 #1)
• Current results of CIRCA questionnaire (Thursday 24 February 2005 #1)
• Van through window raises some troubling art issues / refugee artist's fate hangs in the balance (Friday 18 February 2005)
For a full list of news items, click here.
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