Nothing To Look Forward To But The Past
Curated by Gregory McCartney
Online Exhibition and Publication: Launch Date: 1st December 2020
Venue: Online via Abridged website
Artists: Stuart Cairns, Nadege Meriau, Daniel Seiffert, Tara Wray
Writers: Prof. Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Prof. Peter Knight, Dr Dara Downey, Anna Walsh, Gail McConnell, Sharon Young
This project considers the journey of humanity as a species, and explores an imagined evolutionary path that mixes the animal and human to produce something potentially unknown and new.
The original Nothing to Look Forward to The Past concept was of course written well before the Covid-19 Pandemic but it somewhat eerily articulates the sudden change in everyday life and behaviour as well as our sense of being which the virus has perhaps caused us to reassess. It is also a continuation of the Abridged obsession with actual and metaphorical viruses. Our recent issues have had titles including, Wormwood, Contagion and Relapse.
This post lockdown re-imagining of the project sees the exhibition element move online to the www.abridged.zone website. Working with four artists: Stuart Cairns, Nadege Meriau, Daniel Seiffert and Tara Wray, the online exhibition will be accompanied by a series of essays by academics, poets and writers exploring various aspects of the concept of personal and societal collapse: an attempt to make sense of this recent upheaval in our society and think about how this pandemic will change our journey forward and outlook for the future.
Stuart Cairns is a Belfast-based artist who works with natural materials and found objects picked up on his ‘wanderings’. Working as a silversmith, Cairns combines these natural materials and found objects alongside precious metals to create artefacts in the tradition of tableware and domestic objects.
Nadege Meriau, a French, London based artist whose experimental practice is principally photographic, but encompasses sculptural installations and video work. Best known for her use of organic matter - bread, chicken carcasses, honeycomb - her visceral and sensuous imagery both seduces and disorientates. Spaces are ambiguous and scale is distorted. For each piece Mériau exercises both control and restraint, manipulating and coaxing her materials into certain behaviours or forms, whilst simultaneously allowing nature to take its course.
Tara Wray is a photographer, curator, and filmmaker. Her work is autobiographical in nature and focuses on issues of mental health and the ambivalence of family ties. And dogs. She makes art to understand the world around her and to define her place within it. Her sold out photobook, Too Tired for Sunshine, was published by Yoffy Press in 2018. Recently she founded the Too Tired Project; a non-profit photo initiative helping those struggling with depression by offering a platform for collective creative expression and community.
Daniel Seiffert, Influenced by his political studies, tends to document the true and the real in his photographs. Many journeys prior to and during his artistic career also influenced his worldview and strengthened his desire to preserve time and space. Daniel Seiffert, for example, deals with the transformation of urban places and spaces, youth culture in East Germany or the city of Minsk and their different faces.
There are a number of essays by academics and writers including Professor Lorna Piatti-Farnell (Director of the Popular Culture Research Centre in Auckland and President of the Gothic Society of Australia and New Zealand) explores the taboos of food and eating given that the Covid virus supposedly originated from the consumption of ‘wild’ animals.. As we are fed numerous ‘alternative’ virus origin and cure theories Professor Peter Knight from Manchester University will discuss the phenomena of conspiracy theories and the need for people to believe in something not matter how improbable that something is. Dr Dara Downey from Trinity College will explore environmental collapse with reference to societal structural decay in particular that of the Golden Gate Bridge. Her article focuses on the depiction of the ruined Golden Gate Bridge as a symbol of an equally ruined futurity, a ruination that has already taken place. Poet Anna Walsh will examine the current moment as one of isolation, multiple poverties, and terror, exploring how we engage with one another through art, community, and nature.
Gail McConnell writer and academic from Queens’s university Belfast, will explore the work of Stuart Cairns and Sharon Young, London based artist, will analyse the practise of Nadege Meriau. There will also be a publication, with a print run of 300 featuring the above essays and more, artworks from the exhibition plus twenty poets responding to the Nothing To Look Forward To But The Past theme.
Image: Tara Wray, from the Everything All The Time Never Enough series, 2020, courtesy of the artist.