The Last Portrait: A microscopic view of transience, mourning and loss
(2017)
author(s): Lucy Willow
published in: Research Catalogue
In 2009, I began a photographic series of work titled Memento Mori (remember that you are mortal and will die) based on the melancholic symbolism of 17th Century Dutch Vanitas paintings. Appropriating the symbolic language found in these paintings, I was looking to draw attention to the parallel beauty found in both life and death. The images contained rotting fruit, decaying animals, bubbles, extinguished candles and jewellery to serve as a reminder of the transience of everything in life. The paintings held, within them, an understanding of a narrative from 17th Century culture, which warns against the vanities and temptations in life such as wealth, knowledge, lust and earthly pleasure. The narrative emphasises how we ought not to be distracted by these, but remain focussed on the spiritual, the afterlife. I borrowed the symbolism in order to examine mortality. In the reflection of a sad and moth-eaten taxidermied magpie I saw my own grief, resting between its tatty feathers as I photographed its stuffed corpse. I bought a lambs heart and placed it in the centre of a still life, to signify young loss, vulnerability and sadness. I hid any outward signs of mourning amongst a symbolic visual language that found its expression in the photograph. What else could I do? Working into the surface of the photograph with water, I was able to bleed and merge the colours, giving the surface a visceral, opulent quality that made the image feel as though it was disappearing and rotting in the presence of the viewer. The colour was an externalization of what was happening, on the inside: the feeling of dissolving. I was looking to understand death through the arrangements of objects I assembled and photographed. An event, once photographed, becomes more real. I photographed death, drawing it close, feeling its omnipresence intimately in the midst of life. A photograph confirms reality. The scythe of death cuts through all the unnecessary in life, bringing us to stillness at the core of our being, where nothing else exists but a silent longing for the peace it brings.
LESSONS in the SHADOWS of DEATH
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Laasonen Belgrano, Price, Hjälm, Carlsson Redell, Ideström
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The research project 'Lessons in the Shadows of Death' explores and exposes an almost lost tradition of public mourning - the Art of Lamentation. The project follows the structure of the 17th century musical genre 'Leçons de Ténèbres' – traditionally composed as vocal ‘lessons’ performed during Easter week contemplating the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC and based on the Biblical Lamentations.
The overall purpose is to create and promote an intra-active 'grief-entangled' music practice in relation to public mourning and wounds of loss. Previous artistic research on vocal mad scenes, lamentations and Nothingness (Laasonen Belgrano 2011) and performance philosophical explorations of apophenia and autopoesis (Price 2017) has since 2019 merged and developed into a growing archive investigating ‘ornamentation-as methodology’.
The primary aim of this project is to transform the ornamented music and words of Michel Lambert’s nine Leçons de Tenebres from 1661 into nine video-essays. Together with an international network of artists and scholars we will bring the 17th century musical mourning to a contemporary Jerusalem – a city which lives as a symbol of any falling, wounded and embodied space-time. The project reconfigures the Art of Lamentation as a living practice for a wounded world in need of re-learning how to attend to existential consciousness and communal grief.The research project 'Lessons in the Shadows of Death' explores and exposes an almost lost tradition of public mourning - the Art of Lamentation. The project follows the structure of the 17th century musical genre 'Leçons de Ténèbres' – traditionally composed as vocal ‘lessons’ performed during Easter week contemplating the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC and based on the Biblical Lamentations.
The overall purpose is to create and promote an intra-active 'grief-entangled' music practice in relation to public mourning and wounds of loss. Previous artistic research on vocal mad scenes, lamentations and Nothingness (Laasonen Belgrano 2011) and performance philosophical explorations of apophenia and autopoesis (Price 2017) has since 2019 merged and developed into a growing archive investigating ‘ornamentation-as methodology’.
The primary aim of this project is to transform the ornamented music and words of Michel Lambert’s nine Leçons de Tenebres from 1661 into nine video-essays. Together with an international network of artists and scholars we will bring the 17th century musical mourning to a contemporary Jerusalem – a city which lives as a symbol of any falling, wounded and embodied space-time.
The project reconfigures the Art of Lamentation as a living practice for a wounded world in need of re-learning how to attend to existential consciousness and communal grief.
Finding the time and place to say goodbye
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Madelief van de Beek
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
By researching crematoria and graveyards I try to break the taboo surrounding grief and death. What are the elements of design at these places that could provide comfort? What are the stereotypes about death culture that prevents us from fully accepting what happens to us when we die?
Take picture with me!
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Plhák Vojtěch
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
I grew up in a family full of hunters. I used to go on hunting hunts and was generally pretty in touch with the death of animals. So I'm interested in everything surrounding this topic. At the same time, we are in an era where we share and photograph everything. I question why hunters take pictures with their kill. I also want to point out that these often distasteful photos, they share on Facebook, and or websites where they pat each other on the back. I'm exploring the connection between the camera and the gun.
LOCVS : herinnering en vergankelijkheid in de verbeelding van plaats : van Italische domus naar artistiek environment
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Krien Clevis
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
As an artist, Krien Clevis is fascinated by the phenomenon of place in relation to beginnings and final destinations. This study links up the concept of place with memory, with the idea of transience and the transition from life to death. The main research question addressed the following concern: 'how can I present my work in a way so that it both comprises a representation of place and emerges or exists as a place itself?'
As the research was geared toward places of meaning, Clevis also aspired to create new places of meaning. The search for them involved a journey through time and space __ not just _ la recherche du temps perdu, but also _ la recherche du lieu perdu. The research expanded into various areas that are somewhat affiliated with art, namely archeology, architecture and (art)history. Through the photo works and the installation Clevis created, Clevis intends to share a visual story with the audience and find a way in which viewers of the work may appropriate the story and add to it by mobilizing their own perceptions. The reflections on the quality and characteristics of place took Clevis to the classical houses found in Pompeii and the ancient tombs of Rome and Cerveteri. The connection between these spatial manifestations of life and death as two extremes is essential to me. The historical research made Clevis aware that as an artist Clevis is part of long tradition indeed. As such the artistic sightline cuts across the historical sightline in this work, to which Clevis also added a more personal, autobiographical sightline as a third meaningful dimension.
The City of Fire and the Assembly of Death: Two Encounters
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exposition is a tale of (at least) two encounters performed as a Lesson in the Shadows of Death. In these shadows we find sounding voices, moving bodies and relations between what might be described as extreme opposites. What can be found in place nick named the City of Fire, or the Assembly of Death? Perhaps an opening to this question can be found in this exposition.
By researching crematoria and graveyards I try to break the taboo surrounding grief and death. What are the elements of design at these places that could provide comfort? What are the stereotypes about death culture that prevents us from fully accepting what happens to us when we die?open exposition comments (0)
I grew up in a family full of hunters. I used to go on hunting hunts and was generally pretty in touch with the death of animals. So I'm interested in everything surrounding this topic. At the same time, we are in an era where we share and photograph everything. I question why hunters take pictures with their kill. I also want to point out that these often distasteful photos, they share on Facebook, and or websites where they pat each other on the back. I'm exploring the connection between the camera and the gun.open exposition comments (0)
This exposition is a tale of (at least) two encounters performed as a Lesson in the Shadows of Death. In these shadows we find sounding voices, moving bodies and relations between what might be described as extreme opposites. What can be found in place nick named the City of Fire, or the Assembly of Death? Perhaps an opening to this question can be found in this exposition.open exposition comments (0)