Category: News

This free exhibition investigates the properties of forest memory through text, archive, and ‘xylarium’, or wood collection. Between the French horticultural term “forest trauma” and Robert Pogue Harrison’s “forests of nostalgia”, a whole discipline around history, witnessing, and the memorial qualities of woodland opens up.  Art works examining the cultural expression of time and history in the forest are placed here alongside archival photographs, small press texts, artefacts, and museum objects, in an old, low-lit belfry designed by Sir John Soane.

But, mean glory of the world, / misshapen memory of other seasons, / the forest remains

–          Andrea Zanzotto

We would like to invite you to the opening night on Thursday the 6^th June, beginning at 7.30pm, with free wine and performances by David Chatton Barker, Rob St. John, and Sam and the Plants, using instruments made of found wood. We would particularly like to invite those who may be keen to review, blog, or photograph the exhibition, as well as to meet the people involved. (Exhibition poster here.)

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A candle-lit collection on forests, memory, and social and natural history ● Cabinets of book works, wood works, paintings, drawings, prints, film projection, and music ● Wood specimens and photographs from Kew’s Museum of Economic Botany, English Heritage, the Epping Forest archive, the London Metropolitan Archives, and local collectors ● Tree ring slices and materials from dendrochronology labs ● Installations and one-off editions from forty artists, including Colin Sackett, Chris Drury, Bryan Nash Gill, Richard Skelton, herman de vries, Katsutoshi Yuasa, and Stefka Mueller

The Belfry art gallery (Grade 1 listed), St John on Bethnal Green, 200 Cambridge Heath Road, E2 9PA

Opening night: Thursday 6^th June, 7.30pm till late: Super 8 visuals and wood music by David Chatton Barker, Sam and the Plants, and Rob St. John, with exhibition viewing, free wine, and Nostalgia Forest book launch (Amy Cutler, Oystercatcher Press)

Normal hours: 6th till 11th June/ weeknights 7-9pm, weekends 12-6pm

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This exhibition is taking place with the support of Landscape Surgery at Royal Holloway.

CURATOR: Amy Cutler

ARTISTS / CONTRIBUTORS: Alec Finlay, Peter Larkin, herman de vries, Jeff Hilson, Colin Sackett, Gerry Loose, Justin Hopper, Carol Watts, Camilla Nelson, Anthony Barnett, Edmund Hardy, Una Hamilton Helle, Katsutoshi Yuasa, Richard Skelton, Autumn Richardson, Julian Konczak, Bryan Nash Gill, Amy Cutler, Tom Noonan, Chris Drury, Paul van Dijk, Frances Hatherley, David Chatton Barker, James Aldridge, Chris Paul Daniels, Frances Presley, Stefka Mueller, Gail Ritchie, Christina White, Paul Gough, Morven Gregor, Perdita Phillips, Amy Todman, Peter Jaeger, Zoe Hope, Zoë Skoulding, Peter Foolen, Phil Smith /  Mythogeography, Cees de Boer, Carlea Holl-Jensen, Tony Lopez, Will Montgomery, Michael Hampton, Kate Morrell, Ben Borek, Natalia Janota, Sung Hee Jin, Martin Bridge, Nicholas Branch, Mike Baillie

WITH THANKS: Kate Maxwell, John Wylie, Giles Goodland, Justin Hopper, Kris Rockwell, Jamie Wilkes, Sally Davies, Sally Armisen, Peggy Seymour, Sean Powley, Amy Francis-Smith, Richard, Neville Midwood, Nicholas, Liberty Rowley, Lee Wagstaff, Susan Holl, Carlea Holl-Jensen, Esther Rowley, Mark James, Susan Wright, Matthew Riley, Felix Driver, Harriet Hall, Cara Jessop, Thomas Jellis, Andrew Ray, Matthew Sperling, Candice Boyd, Katie Murphy, Louise Joly, Camilla Nelson, Alice Clark, Innes Keighren, Peter Larkin, Sue Edney, Tilla Brading, Jo Norcup, Sandra Wright, Hilary Orange, Simon Howard, Edmund Hardy, Jenny O’Sullivan, Alexandra Parsons, Charlotte Jones, Sefryn Penrose, Paul Warde, Leo Cutler, Clare Williams, Sarah Browncross, Caroline Cornish, Martin Bridge, Xas Arnaud, Diana Hale, and Gavin MacGregor

Paul Antick’s Research Product #4: The Aestheticization of Smith –featuring actor Raymond Waring (24 Hour Party People, The Cock and Bull Story, 28 Weeks Later) and journalist and writer Iain Miller – is a 45 minute performance piece with two chairs, a table, a screen, three voices and some photographs. It recounts the story of Smith, a fictional photographer and university lecturer, who in 2009 exhibited Research Product #4 in a small park on the outskirts of the medieval Polish city of Toruń. Smith’s exhibition was composed of seven billboard posters, each of which contained an unremarkable colour portrait of a person, or small group of persons, either in or in the vicinity of one of the following ’museums’: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor and Madjanak.

Narrated by the fictional anthropologist Willing (Raymond Waring), this performance will address a number of related incidents: Smith’s appropriation of an image purportedly taken in 1941 by a German soldier called Wily Georg in the Warsaw ghetto; the experience of Holocaust tourism – (that’s to say, Smith’s experience of Holocaust tourism); the uses of photography by a Holocaust tourist – (that’s to say, Smith’s uses of it); the consumption of photography in a public place in Poland; and the connection between Research Product #4 and the commodification of knowledge, including photography, in a notional British university.

Note that Smith’s project bears a resemblance to Paul Antick’s own itourist?, a public art project originally commissioned in 2006 by John Hansard Gallery (UK) and subsequently also staged in 2009 in a small park somewhere in Poland.

Research Product #4: The Aestheticization of Smith is one of a series of recent documentary-fiction projects by Paul Antick featuring the photographer Smith and the anthropologist Willing, who’s current research involves ‘identifying the ways in which Smith behaves in challenging environments and difficult situations’. Other projects in the series include: Smith’s Tour Favela, Smith in Palestine (to be read aloud in its entirety) and Bhopal to Bridgehampton: Schema for a Disaster Tourism Event (see April 2013 issue of Journal of Visual Culture).

The piece will be performed on Saturday 8th June at 1pm at Belfast Exposed. For more information visit http://www.belfastexposed.org/