If you go and see the Summer Show at CCA Galleries International you will find a lot of nice pictures (mainly) of Jersey. Very little work, if any is about anything much more than surfaces and processes - which is fine, if that's what you like. My entry this year, a small screening of two video, Painting after Tragedy / Tragedy after Painting and a set of 1000 unique postcards adapted from my multi-media installation INTERVENTIONS from 1999 when I decided to walk to war in Kosovo during the Balkan conflict in old Yugoslavia. Right now we (Europeans) find ourselves at war again with Russian aggression in Ukraine and Jersey’s offshore finance industry harbouring billions of dollars and businessmen associated with Roman Abramovich. I’m sorry to spoil the garden party with such uncomfortable news. Below are a few words I wrote in a statement when the work was first exhibited at the Danish Museum of Photographic Art in 2000. Have a nice summer!
‘The installation of photography, video, sound and found objects explore the notion of communication, not only as a visual language, but communication as a set of relationships between art and life, war and peace, spectator and creator, memory and language. Thinking it as a long-distance phone call - trying to make sense of the other receiver's non-sense, replacing the phone with organic, singular activity - the installation is in effect a documentation of a man alone walking through Europe to Kosovo. The walk is not to make sense out of something seemingly senseless. French contemporary thinker, Jean-Luc Nancy, has already written that the Sense of the World has come to an end. What remain after or before the 'event' are marks of human subjectivity. We are always already too late for any event, even if we might see it or even experience it. It is impossible to overcome distance by speaking, by writing or by making art. What is left are fragments; visual souvenirs captured like postcards that are too late, recorded after or before the event. Postcards, that do not inform us about an essence, but a mere existence.’
