Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Hertfordshire
Antarctica Silence (Polar South) : [Video portraits, photographs and drawn artefacts from an artist's residency in Antarctica]
In 2010, Nina Colosi, curator at the Chelsea Art Museum (New York City) and founder of The Streaming Museum (http://www.streamingmuseum.org) proposed me for an art residency in Antarctica. The result was an invitation by the National Antarctic Affairs Argentine Chancellery for a residency on three bases in Antarctica.
‘Antarctica Silence’ is a giant, non-toxic image in the snow and ice, based on photographic memory. The intention was to stream the work’s execution and to record the result. A set of sequential, large-scale photographic art works were made during construction and a streamed video version shown to a worldwide audience though The Streaming Museum.
The research focused on portraits involving performance, portraits relating to landscape and environment, and portraits of those who live and work on the bases. The originality of the works consisted in locating the genre of portraiture through the form of a shadow portrait shot in the landscape. The significance of the works was to question and extend traditional notions of portraiture in terms of their location, movement, performance and content. The work questioned to what extent might portraits be static, silent, mobile and might they have other attributes? And how might the traditional genre of portraiture change as it mutates through normative, perfomative and streamed forms? The use of time based media enabled the representation of individuals to be located in a specific place, as evidenced in the use of a filmed performance around a specific location shown in 'Self Portrait Mandala Action', and the 'Thinking White Field’s’ depiction of a central spot on paper to reflect the personal positioning of the artist in a process based drawing. The work was later exhibited at a series of publicly-funded galleries including the Centro de Cultura, Havana, 2011; Foro de la Biodiversidad, Sevilla, 2011 and CCEBA Buenos Aires, 2011.
