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| Paul Seawright: Untitled (woman), 2005 lightjet print on Fuji crystal paper reverse mounted on diasec, framed, edition of six, 127 x 152.4cm; courtesy Kerlin Gallery |
Better known for his stark images of the peripheral, urban landscape of Northern Ireland, Paul Seawright has recently turned his forensic gaze towards Africa and the sprawling ‘invisible’ cities that exist outside of Lagos, Johannesburg, Lusaka and Addis Ababa – the latter being amongst the fastest growing metropolises in the world. Although the geographical focus of Seawright’s images may have shifted, the broader subject has not: these locations are also the proverbial periphery to that which has often been peripheral to Western imaginations in the first place, namely Africa. Seawright, moreover, chooses to show not just peripheral ‘invisible’ cities but the actual periphery of these borderline spaces. In Dolphin Estate, 2005, a motorway cuts across the outskirts of a city and delineates not only the city’s edge but the veritable no-man’s-land that occupies those edges. In Untitled (pylon), 2005, an electricity mast rises up from what would appear to be the absolute rim of an already fringe settlement, its presence incongruous (and yet encouraging) against the low-lying, makeshift huts that nestle in its lee.
These resolutely ‘outside’ spaces are juxtaposed with sombre interiors where individuals go about their business in a seemingly lethargic manner; and these large-scale photographs – whether they be of the verge of a motorway or of a mother and child waiting in what appears to be a doctor’s waiting room – consistently evoke an abiding sense of ennui and listlessness. Nothing in these images appears to be moving – nor does anything seem to be developing. And herein lies an immanent conceptual snare that needs to be addressed: is Seawright documenting the limbolike existence of these ‘invisible’ cities or is he resuscitating the old colonial libels about the indolent African who remains forever outside history and therefore condemned to exist beyond the spaces of modernity. I would want, on the strength of the images presented here, to suggest the former and propose that Seawright is effectively documenting a series of interstitial places and their inhabitants. However, to argue as much largely depends upon how we read our own relationship to these photographs: is our anxiety at seeing images of relative bleakness and atrophied austerity just another indication of our (ultimately detached) liberal anxiety about Africa and its poor? And if so, has Seawright managed to replicate precisely the nebulous sense of that anxiety in these photographs? The obdurate refusal to confront the condition of Africa is here interwoven with the scopic drive that compels us, voyeuristically, to do precisely that: to look at that which is consistently over-looked, so to speak, and that which exists on the periphery of our (highly selective) vision.
Anthony Downey is a PhD candidate at GoldsmithsCollege, London and the Programme Director of the M.A. in ContemporaryArt at Sothebys Insitute London.
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