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ABSENCE + PRESENCE

"Is it more important to preserve the sites of pleasure or of pain?" Lucy Lippard

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 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 Guatamala, 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,

Doris Salcedo - Atrabiliarios [Defiant], 1992 (1)

 
  • What stories are hidden within the buildings or landscape around you?
  • Is history fact or fiction?
  • Design a monument for someone or something overlooked.
  • How do you know if you are really here? What is the proof of your existence?
  • What is your earliest memory? What are the colours, the sounds, the smells?

DISCUSS

RESEARCH

BRAINSTORM

DESCRIBE

COMPARE

Willie Doherty - The Outskirts, 1994. (1)

 

"My memory stammers: but my soul is a witness."
James Baldwin

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 Hô 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 Slacedo in Colombia, Willie Doherty in Northern Ireland) have made work which is in some way an archeology 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: