The
monument or war memorial is erected to honour heroes or mark an historic event.
But who decides what is publicly remembered and what is forgotten? Sometimes
a place or event has a special personal significance, invisible to everyone
else but you. Sometimes the smallest or strangest things can trigger your memories
of that place.
They
say '
absence makes the heart grow
fonder', but does it make the memory stronger or does it make it fade away?
Since
its invention, the photographic image has been used as evidence, as if - by
way of the camera - the viewer can bear witness to an event, a tragedy, an atrocity.
But photographs, like diaries or indeed like memories, conceal as much as they
reveal. They are full of visual codes and constructed meanings, those placed
by the maker and those formed
by the viewer.
Throughout
history, portraits (painted, sculpted and photographic) have been
used to help us recall absent friends or stand in for missing persons. They
stubbornly deny the erasure of
'the
disappeared' - 'los desaparecidos' - in
Chile or Colombia or Guatemala or wherever. The people depicted are both seen
and not seen. Objects too, particularly clothing, carry real
and imagined traces, imprints
of those who used or owned
them.
The
subject of war and its effects have long had a place within the history of world
art - official British war artists have been appointed since 1916 to record
or interpret conflict. Artists have also worked unofficially to reveal secrets,
to counter propaganda and give voice to untold stories.
How
can you document events long past or people who have vanished, unrecorded? The
land is a blind witness to events, to history, but sometimes it carries the
scars like the trace of trenches in Belgium or the radioactive soil of Chernobyl
or the Ho Chi Minh trail in Viet Nam. Cities also contain messages from the
past to the present, in their official monuments, public murals and graffiti.
In a way,
they all say "I was here."
By
projecting oneself onto the landscape, can one feel a sense of the place? By
filling the silence, framing it with voices, sounds or words, is it possible
to resurrect or reconstruct the narratives played out there?
Both artists featured
here (Doris Salcedo in Colombia, Willie Doherty in Northern Ireland) have
made work which is in some way an archaeology of the social violence and personal
sorrow experienced in their homelands. Some other artists, whose work you
might explore in relation to the subjects of absence and presence are:
