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Single-channel video collage reflecting on transitional notions of purity and beauty.
Made from various VHS tapes of orphan material, particularly home movies and television recordings sourced from ebay.
Commission for socl:e collective: Uglification. Metaculture - Kyiv, Ukraine, 2019.
www.soclecollectif.com/uglification
my leprosarium
i remember the images of firdos square,
in baghdad,
in 2003,
a giant saddam,
tumbling,
head first,
into a crowd,
like greg louganis,
like a hood at the gallows,
i remember the ephemeral us flag,
the chain leash,
and exotic white marble,
i remember wanting to change the channel.
like the debris,
and unaligned,
perforated marble,
when renaming a metro station,
or vcr,
in a skip,
in that moment,
of severance,
beyond preservation,
or promise of ruin,
when history is defined,
by the intricacies,
of disfiguration,
just absent,
like a phantom limb.
and bleak,
like the facade,
of a multiplex,
in malaga,
in 1995,
the sterility,
monolithic,
and euthanising,
but glorious,
and un-apologeticly,
consumptive,
in a sentiment,
not unlike,
the cascading red flag,
of the reichstag,
reversing,
impertinent,
and blind.
and so equally,
with discomposure,
defacing the possessions,
of a ten year old,
ambivalently,
placed on a shelf,
amidst glass partitions,
uncovered in pairs,
and reclaimed by trauma,
i reconstruct a vision,
of certainty,
and peace time,
beyond banality,
and mediocrity,
to conceal,
fragility
by looting,
with confidence,
the conquered remnants,
of a displaced nostalgia,
like toppling statues,
in my leprosarium.
The concept of The Leprosarium is taken from the novel of the same name by Volodymyr Vynnychenko (1880-1951),
who served as the first prime minister of the Ukrainian People's Republic (1917-1921).
socl:e collective: Uglification. Metaculture - Kyiv, Ukraine, 2019.
https://www.soclecollectif.com/uglification
Unused text for exhibition cartel.
In 1963, Forough Farrokhzad wrote of a leper colony in Tabriz, “There is no shortage of ugliness in the world.” Her bleak portrait of ugliness, “The House is Black” is a modest, merciful gesture in an effort to “Wipe out this ugliness”. In a way she liberates her lepers, by cementing their damnation. She humanises and preserves their decaying faces, with an unrelenting honesty. To make them beautiful, she casts their disfigurement in theology. Set against passages from the Quran, she creates for them, distant admirers in the anonymity of time. 25 years prior, displaced to a farm in Mougins. Volodymyr Vynnychenko wrote, “The Leprosarium”. Bereft of nationality, his vision for Socialist Ukraine sabotaged, dismantled and removed from libraries. He contemplates the sickness of Europe in a morbid image. A pit of lepers confined to a giant leprosarium. The lepers betray and oppress one another, in a futile struggle to capture a glimpse of sunlight. However, illustrated by the pursuit of virtuous protagonist Yvonne Volvyn. His own modest gesture to transform this ugliness, through “Concordist” programmes, to “lead mankind out of leprous Egyptian captivity”, ultimately went undiscovered, as “The Leprosarium” was first published in 1999. By this time, it’s naive, modernist singularity had itself decayed beyond any recognition, or relevance, to contemporary Europe. Which in the same year, had been engulfed by The Slim Shady LP and the image of Saddam Hussein in bondage. But just 40 years earlier, at the the Iyonda leper colony, in Belgian Congo. Deep in the ruin of “burn out”, Edith Lechat would capture the only known film of Graham Greene. In an effort to cure his own ugliness, the mental stagnation and inflated ego of an ageing writer. He finds inspiration by immersing himself in a landscape of inescapable, immeasurable suffering. In what would become, “A Burnt Out Case”. Greene transforms himself through the leprosarium.
And so, consequently, as Greene transformed himself through the contemplation of suffering, I contemplate this dichotomy. Is ugliness a mask that beauty wears, or is it the absence of beauty? And what to make of the recurring symbology of the leprosarium. It’s relationship to inspiration, somehow the apparatus of the leprosarium is transformative, through clinical isolation and subjugation. Maybe ugliness is just inseparable from beauty, and inspiration creates a distance. Therefore, the distance is transformative, like the leprosarium. Like in the haunting image of a leper, applying mascara in “The House is Black”. The leprosarium lies in the contemplation of ugliness, at its most banal and revealing.
*A pre-revolutionary Iranian poet and filmmaker. As divisively modern, iconoclastic and female, her life was shrouded in controversy, ultimately dying in a car accident at 32. Her work was subsequently banned for more than a decade following the Islamic Revolution in 1979. † At roughly the same time Farrokhzad was attempting to absolve the lepers of Iran. In The Village Voice, in New York, Jonas Mekas* made his own reflection on this absolution. “So what? Don't we have enough ugliness already? And don't we know these things already? Why always fight ugliness with ugliness, stupidity with stupidity, displaying still more and more of it? Why not create something beautiful to fight the ugliness with? Not that I am for escapism (although there is nothing wrong with it). René Clair was not an escapist in A Nous la Liberté. And Chaplin never was. No poet ever is. Neither are tulips, willow trees, Louise Brooks, or cranes. But they fight ugliness just by being there, by emanating beauty, peace, truth.” ‡ A leading Ukrainian modernist writer, that served as first Prime minister of the Ukrainian Peoples Republic, prior to the formation of Ukraine as a Soviet Republic. His work, subsequently banned from 1933 to 1987. § Vynnychenko’s philosophy developed in exile, resembling some kind of Nietzschean utopian socialism. ‖ An English novelist. Shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966 and 1967.
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