New Graffiti, Old Revolutions is an exhibition that imagines readings of contemporary culture as seen through the prisms of the ‘hauntological’ and the ‘spectral.’ These ideas are understood as ways of inscribing the past within the present, not as a way to order knowledge, but as a means of encountering the strange, the unheard of, the obscure and the other. The term Hauntology was first used by Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx and more recently it has become shorthand in music criticism as a way of reading (analysing) music that is sample based and/or reliant on obsolete technologies. However it’s origins can be speculated back to Marcel Proust’s À La Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time), where he puts forward the notion of ‘involuntary memory;’ the unexpected and sudden recurrence of the forgotten. The exhibition is a place to test our relation to the obsolete by examining the elusive identities of the living, and exploring the boundaries between the thought and un-thought. The idea is to create a ‘spectral’ debate to understand what ‘hauntology’ could mean in terms of artistic methodologies and productions.
Since 2008 Edward Clydesdale Thomson has been traveling to Tromsø in order to realize a photographic project which uses official and unofficial archives to uncover the relation between landscape, politics and local identity. Sidestepping the conventions of research he re-imagines the archive as a source of evocative imagery and multiple narratives - a place for speculation beyond the confines of sanctioned histories. “My most recent work stems from a fixation with landscape and cultural formation. A resurgence in the appreciation of local identity has emerged in Tromsø over the last two years and I’ve repeatedly spent periods there fascinated and bewildered by this. The Borderline Picturesque & The Recounting Prospect works stems from this period. I collected as many postcards as I could, dividing and categorizing them in the studio. I made two still life images depicting the postcards. One is of ethnographical portraits, the other, a house of cards made from generic landscape postcards of the area. Together the images address two competing sides in the resurgence of local identity in Tromsø; one being the Samisk culture, the other, Northern Norwegian culture.”
Curated by Jason Coburn.
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