Nadia Thondrayen
A talk and tour of the current exhibition was delivered to us by Nadia Thondrayen, Gallery and Exhibitions Co-ordinator, in early October. She spoke about the space and how the programme of Peninsula Arts Gallery is reflective of the research at the University, and is selected by a board of faculty tutors. There are four shows a year and all range in medium, concept, size, scale and material but are all contemporary exhibitions.
She spoke about the space and the problems it can pose, the gallery is not indemnified which means it doesn’t have sufficient security to be insured by the government to hold works considered of ‘high value’. Many large, well established galleries across the UK have this status which means they are insured to exhibit expensive works of art, and the work is insured as it travels around the country. Though the gallery cannot exhibit works of a high financial value they still successfully hold contemporary and exciting exhibitions. Whilst BAS7 was in Plymouth, Peninsula Arts Gallery was a location where work was exhibited, the fact that they were not indemnified affected the placing of the work around the city to overcome this problem.
The large windows which line the entire front wall ceiling to floor also pose problems of UV exposure to work, Nadia spoke about how they inform all artists about the problems this can pose and they agree that there is a risk of slight damage to the work through this exposure.
Nadia also explained a little about her own art career since she began studying; she studied Art and Art History and University of Reading then an MA in Museum and Gallery Studies at St Andrews University. After studying she then got the role of curator at Slough Museum where she managed many collections, archives and learnt some valuable skills in preserving, keeping and taking care of artefacts and items. Nadia then went on to study an MA in Curating Contemporary Arts and during her study she worked as an Assistant Curator at the Haywood Gallery in London, she was also working there when BAS7 was exhibited at the gallery and visited Plymouth as part of her work for the show. She travelled to many parts of the world after completing her Masters and aimed to see as many shows and biennals as possible to see Contemporary Art from different cultures, not just the Western angle she’d studied. Finally Nadia got the position of Gallery and Exhibitions Co-ordinator at Peninsula Arts and enjoys the change in environment, flexibility, responsibility and space compared to London.
DOCUMENT – Vandy Rattana, James Smith, The Atlas Group
DOCUMENT ‘exhibition will uncover each artists’ personal responses to their respective political environments. James Smith documents intricate details in the urban and rural landscape, influenced by post-war Britain, whilst Vandy Rattana records the devastation of the U.S. Military on neutral Cambodia during the Vietnam War. Playing with the shifting notions of fact and fiction The Atlas Group looks to re-construct memory by presenting a counter-memory of the Lebanese Civil Wars.’ (Thondrayen, 2013)
Bomb Ponds, 2005 is the piece exhibited by Vandy Rattana. When he was in school the government had removed Cambodia’s recent war history from the curriculum so he grew up fairly unaware of the tragedy that was caused, mainly by the U.S. Military during the Vietnam war. His work in DOCUMENT consists of 9 photographs which document the large contaminated craters that scar the landscape of areas of Cambodia where they were bombed – locally they are known as the ‘bomb ponds’. His work also features a film which documents first hand accounts of the bombings in juxtaposition to the still photographs.
James Smith ‘scrutinises post-war British landscapes’, Temporal Dislocation, 2011 illustrates exactly this point – each image seems grounded in architectural thought and composition. Ideas of New Brutalism influence his work, and the viewer ‘encounters’ these objects of post-war architecture while standing in front of these expansive photographs. The images contain mundane, stark landscapes featuring telegraph poles, portacabins, car parks and haystacks; however all of these things symbolise something about British culture and landscape for Smith.
Walid Raad founded The Atlas Group in 1999 with the hopes of documenting the Civil war from 1975-1990 in Lebanon. The Atlas Group documents and archives accounts and eye witness stories to explore the impact of the civil wars – this is then built into various mediums including performance, video and photography. The group is in fact a figment of Raad’s imagination and he presents these personal testimonies as real and uses them in exhibitions and performances. He states his ‘documents should not be examined through the conventional and reductive binary of fiction and non-fiction but as a way to address the harsh realities of the Civil War by consistently blurring the boundaries’.
The work of the Atlas Group is therefore a fictional archive, slipping between history and fictional narrative documenting a period of time. We Can Make Rain But No One Came To Ask, 2005, is the work that he exhibited in DOCUMENT – a video piece in the centre of the gallery. This was not the piece of work Nadia had wanted for the exhibition but they offered this piece instead – it is interesting to consider how the exhibition would have changed if there was a different piece of work by the Atlas Group.
All of the work in the exhibition looks at war and how it affects landscape and environment – each in their own country with their own personal influences and interests taking form on the work. Rattana documenting those areas affected in Cambodia with film and photography, Smith exploring the affects of a post war Britain on urban and rural spaces and architecture and the Atlas Group forming an archive and documentation of the effects of civil war in Lebanon but with the approach of fictional and historical narrative.
The way the exhibition was curated was generally well thought out and utilised the space well. I liked the way Vandy Rattana’s work was curated as the photography seemed to compliment and support the video and it almost had its own separate area. The Atlas Group had their film in a blacked out space in the middle of the gallery which was entered through a black curtain which didn’t quite close and it did look unprofessional. I also think the blacked out space could have been relocated to a corner of the room so it didn’t intrude on James Smith’s work – though there was a theme of documentation I thought it was intrusive to the other work and drew to much attention to this intriguing blacked out room.
It was interesting to see how well the artists linked with each other though, although different, they all dealt with the idea of documenting quite political issues in different cultures and countries.
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