Ballardian

Michelle Lord, whose “Future Ruins” series featured on Ballardian here and here, is participating in a new exhibition entitled “Relocating Absence”, which runs from 18 April to 4 May 2008.

RELOCATING ABSENCE
Elevator Gallery
Mother Studios, Queens Yard, White Post Lane,
Hackney Wick, London E9 5EN

www.elevatorgallery.co.uk
www.myspace.com/elevatorgallery

“Future Ruins” appears alongside the work of Brada Barassi, Craig Cooper, Amelia Crouch, Hondartza Fraga, Zbigniew Tomasz Kotkiewicz, Anastasia Loginova, Erin Newell, Ellakajsa Nordström, Anahita Razmi, Erica Scourti, Mikio Saito and Youngho Lee.

The exhibition is curated by Elisa Tosoni, Cherie-Marie Veiderveld and Simon Reuben White.

Relocating Absence is a group exhibition showcasing the work of thirteen internationally emerging artists. Through a variety of media, including sculpture, installation, video, photography and drawing, the exhibition offers a series of artistic interpretations of the theme, often playing with the constants of space and time. Absence, in fact, is essentially temporal – it is located where something was: it lies between the realms of Being (object) and Knowledge (perception, creation of a mental image).

Absence can be intended as a state of being, as a period of time, as a lack, or even desire, or as the inattention to present surroundings or occurrences. All these connotations are encountered in the exhibition, which, in fact, proposes an open-ended investigation of the concepts of belonging, displacement, repetition, visual and literary narrative, emotional and physical distance, as well as archive, memory and diary keeping.

The artists have created presence from absence, erased the pre-existent iconography of presence, drawn the viewers’ gaze to details that would otherwise have remained long unnoticed. These acts of relocating, of replacing, collecting or remembering what was there continue absence into the future: new tangible objects now substitute or relocate a previous absence, soon to leave room to new absences, in the viewer’s mind.

Elisa Tosoni, 2008.