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Herzliya: The Belfast Way at Herzliya Museum of Art CIRCA 112 review
Israel is the perfect site for an exhibition of work from Northern Ireland. Like the North, the more you see of it, the less you understand. The complexities and paradoxes are just as fierce and the young armed soldiers on the streets and bag checks at every shop and café are eerily familiar if you're from the North. However, roadblocks and strip searches are not part of daily life for the wealthy inhabitants of Herzliya, a beach town north of Tel Aviv. I suspect Dan Shipsides' work is the most accessible to visitors to this group show of ten artists from Belfast. Green Line Sisyphus , an eighteen-minute video loop of the artist climbing around and around a hunk of desert rock, is a succinct metaphor for the repetitive, durational struggle that is the Middle East. Tightly framed, the rock appears brainlike, implacable - as stuck as the many minds that have strived to find a solution. Wonderfully experiential, Shipsides knows to dodge a moral standpoint. The strongest element of his other work, Temporary viewpoint, topology of Israel , is its installation. A video tracking a car journey and hike through the Israeli landscape shows the limitations of documentary, but being forced to climb a precarious set of wooden steps bolted to scaffolding to view the small monitor near the ceiling is a touch of genius. You at once undergo the vertiginous effect of being in Israel and the physical sensation of an observation tower. Seamus Harahan handles documentary truths by adeptly side-stepping conventions in his superbly layered visual poem, Holylands . Unfortunately the accompanying text does not explain that this Holyland is a ladder of streets off the Ormeau Road named after Jerusalem, Damascus and Palestine. Harahan's style is casual. He selects seemingly arbitrary shots of local drunks, graffiti, an empty milk carton being blown down the street, a helicopter in the sodium-lit sky, a lace-curtained window. The images are often jumpcut to a sampled soundtrack of civil rights' speeches, classical music, postpunk, Springsteen, slowed-down hip-hop, blues and Irish ballads. He uses the camera like a breeze, caressing a pink flower, then the pale bare chest of a teenage boy playing in the gush of a burst water main. It's sad but never soppy, delicate but not slight - a tender, curious surveillance to redeem all the brutal watching this community has suffered. No-one is asked to give their opinion, to justify or explain, and this is a sweet relief.
Go home , Miriam de Búrca's video, is as potent here as it is in Ireland. The short piece cuts between two shots of empty roads along the Peace Wall to the steady beat of a drum. Anxious choice drives the narrative. There are no cars or people, as if sectarianism has won, the walls have worked - everyone has gone home. Except the artist, who is paralysed. Claustrophobic, insistent, it stresses that concrete can't construct peace. Mary McIntyre's photographs of night-time landscapes also understands the subtle nuances of menace. Apparently bucolic, these tree-lined paths are lit by streetlamps under a murky, urban sky, giving them a vaguely forensic shiver. McIntyre lets the context hover at the edges rather than consume the image: these are the leafy shortcuts we have learnt not to take. Some works rely heavily on textual backup, such as Moira McIver's Portrait, diary, biography and Susan MacWilliam's Kuda bux and fare less well. In each case, the installation obscures rather than develops an intriguing story about a heroic, historical figure. Although Aisling O'Beirn's series of cardboard maquettes of Belfast's sectarian, architectural peculiarities also needs text to outline their significance, they have a compact, compelling presence. Like Harahan, she invents a visual language rather than reiterate the over-determined images used to represent the North. Cherry Smyth is a writer and curator based in London. Article reproduced from CIRCA 112, Summer 2005, pp. 80 - 81 [406]
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