Output details

In a Place Like This'

The book ‘In a Place Like This’ (also available at http://inaplacelikethis.com/) is a collection of essays and images that keeps faith with the characteristics of Higgins’ practice, to (re) integrate images and emotional understandings of violence ‘in and through’ the act of representation itself in order to ‘un-fix’ and contest their active role.

It was conceived through a four year collaboration between Higgins and Sandborg, which included a developmental exhibition Flowers Violence Landscapes, Bergen, 2011, a seminar White Flowers & an Elephant in the Room, 2011 and a paper for Sensuous Knowledge conference, Bergen, 2013. The book itself was reviewed by three independent anonymous peer-reviewers, appointed by KhiB research board.

The body of work proposes a historically active form of coded and constructed representation between Masaccio’s painting ‘Expulsion from the garden of Eden’ and ‘four photographs’ from the Auschwitz museum archive. It does this by examining the dialogue found between visual depiction and fragments of historic representations of violence.

It raises two questions. How do we approach represented facts that appear ‘fixed’ through complex relationships of personal immediacy? how do we operate with and through the testimony that these representations appear to offer, when they are seen in relation to our image-saturated world?

The process involved the collaborative production of paintings, photographs and texts, with Sandborg contributing his focus on questions about the ‘photograph as authentic document’. Higgins’ contribution built on unloud (output 1), situated in contemporary questions of image-making, painting and ethics addressed specifically by Goddard’s ‘Histoire de Cinema’, Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Images in Spite of All’, Gerhard Richters’ ‘October 18, 1977, Aby Warburg's ‘Mnemosyne Atlas’.