My photo slideshow here:
https://schooloftraditionalarts.org/degree-shows/degree-show-2025/
Category: Uncategorised
V & A ‘Taste’ Late
25.07.25
goldsmith’s graduate show 2025 (23rd June) – dr suneel mehmi
SEE THE PHOTO SLIDESHOW ON MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL ‘MEHMIS FILMS’ HERE:
https://youtu.be/yk3KPL7Uuqo
1. Nigel Chan – 7/7
Very kindly and attentively, Nigel led me and my friend around the artworks. He was reading Tolstoy and we discussed Russian literature and the nature of artistic meaning, its ambiguity and its polyphony of interpretations.
To me, Nigel’s image of a stranded picnic blanket next to a fruit machine in a huge expanse of field spoke of intense loneliness and isolation. The objects are things for humans but there are no humans in the image. The implication is that this is a representation of reality, an objective view at gambling. And the human things themselves are dimunitive, suggesting their insignificance. There is a perceptual shift to focus on these human things, the cloth and the machine. And as we gaze in detail at these things, we could perhaps reflect upon the isolation of the gambler that plays the fruit machine, as they are locked into a lonely game of the self against fate.
The painting is slanted to imitate the screen of the fruit machine, so in a sense, the viewer is inhabiting the body of the player. We are all gamblers, we all play our games against chance perhaps? The positioning of the unplayed fruit machine and the empty picnic blanket is almost level with the horizon, suggesting a contrast of the red with the blue sky: sin versus goodness. There is a surrealism in the image since it is placed in a field with an unexpected fruit machine there. Is this a removal of human context to suggest a highly personal experience? An equation of isolated gambling with wildness and the antisocial?
2. Guy Nicholls/Iris Inc. – Wave Yourself a Long Goodbye Because This Moment Breaks Through
irisinc.co.uk
@iris_inc
As I entered the abandoned swimming pool that was now functioning as an art gallery, a surge of music took over. It turned out that Guy Nicholls was performing a song with a rich bassline. I caught him at the end of the performance and he told me that he wanted to test the boundaries of what counted as art and performance with his vocals and the music behind it. The heavy bass was to course through the body and provide a visceral experience to the viewer.
3. Yoobin Lee – (Harvard women programmers woven cloth and performance)
Insta: @yoobz_not_found
Arrayed in dazzling white in a white room, I noticed that Yoobin Lee was barefoot. Actually, she was taking a break from her performance and she told us about her piece.
The cloth featuring the early Harvard women computer programmers was a celebration of female ingenuity, a recovered story of their contribution to the computer revolution. At the same time, there was a celebration of the links between weaving and computing, since computing and its punch cards had evolved from looms.
Abruptly, she turned away and climbed a dizzying ladder. The performance now began. She plucked at the immense loom she had created like a harp. There was the revealing of the practice of weaving and the reality of the loom, the craft that has manufactured our computer led society. What was the significance of that journey up the ladder to perch on that ledge amongst the ceiling? Perhaps the performance reflected our journey through time and history into the age of the computer through the loom and weaving, the trajectory upwards into technological progress. The elevation of the women as weavers that have created this society as in the cloth of the Harvard programmers? The whiteness of the room and Yoobin Lee’s clothing perhaps an allusion to the environments of computer manufacture.
4. Hyun Kim – Abstract Love
hyunjoeykim.com
@hyunjoeykim
What is love? How can it be represented visually? Hyun’s piece explored these interesting questions. Is love obvious? Or is love abstract? The argument made in this piece was that love was abstract. There was a contrast in the representation of abstract love with the padlocks on the gates that attempted to lock love, to render it immortal (it is a lover’s practice to lock souls with these padlocks, apparently). In the abstract side of love, there were remnants of failed relationships which showed that love was not eternal but fleeting.
The piece reminded me of King Lear. Cordelia’s unspoken love versus the false (and obvious), spoken love of her sisters. Here, the idea was translated into the visual realm: abstract love versus obvious love.
What was interesting in the artistic binary that was being created was the awareness of the cultural specificity of ideas of love. Hyun mentioned the role of religion in creating ideas of love. In Indian culture, love has to be shown. One cannot be a Cordelia. There must be speaking and there must be demonstration, there must be the obvious.
5. Ash Jo – Body Botany Chapel Performance
A very beautiful and mesmerising performance unfolded in the chapel as Ash Jo interacted with a simulacrum of her body from which the lillies she had grown had emerged. The idea was the passage of time and the role of memories. There was a ritualistic quality to the motions, with incense and the ringing of the bell which called to mind Buddhist and Hindu practices. There was a great subtletly to the peformance and a subtle dynamism as the two players circled one another and then they were brought towards each other. The climax of the action, when the flowers were cut, was a huge contrast to the original stillness.
6. Zoe Portela – Crackers Party
Insta: @zoefilthyrich
What attracted me to Zoe’s Gallery was the quality of the singing. She had a very fine voice. There was a sort of mad hatter’s tea party happening, full of life and chaos. It was immersive musical theatre with the visitors gathered at the table too. Very vibrant and enjoyable, a very accessible art form.
student interviews: central school of st martin’s graduate show
22.06.2025
A good jaunt to the graduate show with my friend, I managed to get quite a few artist interviews while I was there. Here’s a few summaries:
Priyal Jain
Exceptionally aromatic and very light, Priyal’s sandalwood jewellery is intended to bring a versatile and innovative new material to the field of jewellery design. The jewellery is shaped by native craft techniques and celebrates Indian culture. The jewellery is a wearable, concrete aroma and therefore there is a synaesthetic approach to design, the invocation of the senses of sight, smell and touch. Wood has always been used in religious jewellery in India – Priyal mentioned the ‘rudraksh’ (the tears of Shiva) to me. This was the movement of that beauty of the wood into the secular realm of fashion.
“Priyal Jain is an Indian jewellery designer who explores the intersection of identity, memory, and material through sculptural, and sensory design. Rooted in storytelling and ancestral craft, her work bridges the personal and the architectural. Her collection, Baari — is carved from sandalwood and stillness.”
Jiangling Wang
https://ualshowcase.arts.ac.uk/@jianglingwang
https://www.instagram.com/jiangling._wang/#
jianglingwang9@gmail.com
A merging of textile and jewellery design, these interdisciplinary ethereal pieces were almost celestial in their magnificence. Jiangling put one of the pieces on my friend and the jewellery immediately transformed him and transported him to an otherworldly realm. Wonderfully detailed, textural and beautiful, the technique of treating silver as threads of cloth created a gossamer-like miracle of light, both delicate and imposing. The intense work on each piece created an unforgettable and sophisticated visual memory. The translation of weaving techniques into jewellery design represented the nature of innovation: bringing knowledge from one field into another to create a new visuality like Harry Beck’s knowledge of circuit boards into the represention of the map and geographical space.
“The CANG series draws inspiration from textile craftsmanship, exploring the interaction between tools, techniques, and materials in the formation of jewellery structures. Silver serves as the primary medium, hand-twisted into various wire forms, then woven, assembled, and reconstructed to examine the flow and rhythm between lines.”
Helena Palmeira
https://www.instagram.com/helenapalmeira/?hl=en
https://www.instagram.com/estudiohelenapalmeira/?hl=en
Helena’s aim was to celebrate the local materials of Brazil and to build exclusive luxury jewellery items with them. The nature of the materials shaped the designs. The vegetable ivory took time to shape. The wood pieces were an intriguing story. The wood was now extinct in Brazil so the only way to source it was to trawl through vintage markets to obtain the material. It took Helena about two months to find some old furniture that was made out of this now extinct wood and to repurpose it. The work had an emphasis on sustainability and also on difficulty: difficulty in sourcing, difficulty in shaping. But difficulty built exclusive, rare, unique pieces of jewellery. It was inaccessibility and hard labour which created the treasure.
“Helena Palmeira is a Brazilian artist and designer whose practice explores the intersections between body, materiality, and cultural identity.
A graduate of Central Saint Martins (MA Design), Helena’s work is grounded in deep material research and an ongoing dialogue with historical, social, and personal narratives.
Through a sculptural and tactile approach, she reimagines objects as mediums of transformation, expression, and connection.
Sustainability, cultural memory, and the reshaping of form are at the core of her process, often working with responsibly sourced materials such as reclaimed woods, botanical elements, fairmined gemstones, and recycled metals.”
Julie Yuan
Insta: @julilie.y
An innovative screen with four divisions, ‘like everything left in disarray’ played with the two dimensionality of the image and the three dimensionality of the screen and its enclosure of space, with the tension between opacity and invisibility. The screen represented the projection of the dream onto human memories and photography, the merging of fantastical elements with the recording of reality. My friend was particularly impressed with the painterly brushstrokes and the subtle, mother of pearl aesthetic of the piece.
Dalia Halwani
Insta: @dxlixhxl
Dalia’s video installation was surrounded by her photography. She criticised the Orientalist tropes of sci-fi films such as contemporary avatars of the Odalisque which worked with dog-whistle racism to denigrate Arabs and Arabic culture in the capitalistic framework of the Western film industry. And which subverted that culture through the sexualisation of its misappropriated characters. The piece was mounted on a carpet which invoked the stereotypical imagery associated with the Arabs such as the fantastical flying carpet from feature films such as Disney’s Alladin.
corps flottants fashion show – photography by dr suneel mehmi
friday 20.06.2025
You can see my photo slideshow of this fashion exposition and its beautiful women models here:
Dickens House 100th Anniversary
09.06.2025
Last night, my friend invited me to come down to the Dickens House as it was free entry. I had been before a few times a few years ago when I used to volunteer at the Foundling Hospital Museum down the road. Charles Dickens is one of my favourite authors as I admire his maximalist style, his sentimentality and also the fact that he came from an impoverished background and was a champion of the oppressed (except for the colonised and the Indians). As I am a published expert on Charles Dickens (‘The Preservation of the Power Name ‘Boz’ and the Foundling’ in The Dickens Quarterly), I decided to go down and give him a tour around the place. It was almost like being invited into the author’s home by the author himself. A visit to the ghost.
On arrival, I was given solicitous care by the staff because they saw I was carrying a walking stick. And almost at once, I met a volunteer I work with because I am also in the museums industry. As ever, he showcased his great customer service skills.
We started off in the kitchen downstairs and I was very pleased to see how inviting and friendly the volunteers were. We spoke to two of them, one an intern who was a student in Museum studies. The volunteer in the kitchen was very knowledgeable and we talked about Dickens’s love of food and wine which stemmed from his starvation as a child. We speculated on whether he would have spent any time in the kitchen. There was a likelihood as he was quite fastidious in matters as a whole and food was one of his especial subjects. In the corner of the room there was an interesting curator label – after Dickens, one of the residents in the house had been a sufragette who had slashed the Velazquez Venus in the National Gallery.
In the laundry room, I commented to another visitor, a blonde American lady, that this was the height of sophistication and luxury in that period. They even boiled the Christmas pudding there once a year!
On the ground floor, in the dining room, we admired the Moses Pickwick clock that had been gifted to Charles Dickens. I had written about Charles Dickens’s assumption of the name Moses in my article, so I knew quite a lot about this gentleman who had been a foundling. We speculated on who had carved the letters C.D. onto one of the utensils in the room.
The second room on the ground floor was the morning room. We spent quite a while gazing at the portrait of Catherine, Dickens’s wife. This captivating piece was painted by Daniel Maclise. The setting is the morning room itself. In response to what one of the visitors said, and sadly to disillusion her, I mentioned that Dickens eventually separated from her and even tried to get her admitted to a lunatic asylum. There was the President of one of the Dickens Committee there and I told her about my article about Dickens.
Upstairs, there was Dickens’s study and the drawing room. I was excited to see the desk where all the magic happened. It was always the highlight of my trip there in the past. A volunteer called Michael answered my friend’s questions and told us about the lighting at the time for writing. Then he answered my questions about who owned the house at the moment and showed me to the drawing room because I said to him that I had heard that the descendant of Dickens was there too.
The drawing room was magnificent. It must have been such a wonderful experience to meet the author there. The descendant was a handsome, brown-haired, articulate and charismatic young gentleman called Ollie. I watched an eager crowd filming him as they asked him questions. I waited until they had gone and asked him if he wrote himself. Not so much he said, although he was an actor. I said that then he was following in Dickens’s footsteps and we talked about the author’s dramatic experiences.
In the exhibitions space, we admired the only surviving costume that we knew Dickens had worn and talked about his heroism when there was a train wreck. It was also a great highlight to see the Gold beater’s arm (‘the Golden Arm’) of a Tale of Two Cities. While for Dickens, it stood for the brutality of the Revolution, for me the anarchist, it stood as a symbol of hope for the transformation of the present and the future.
On the second floor, it was interesting to learn that Dickens had surrounded himself with mirrors so that he could practice his acting. I imagined him there, gesticulating in front of his mirrors, refining the expressions on his face, communicating something to his imaginary audience.
In the dressing room, we looked out of the window that Dickens might have looked out of. An emotional moment was in Mary Hogarth’s bedroom. I imagined her dying in Dickens’s arms and I said to my friend that I found the sentimentality in the work of Dickens very affecting. I had found the death of Little Nell (modelled on Mary Hogarth, his young sister-in-law) to be quite affecting. It is the emotion that Dickens arouses that is the draw to his work in a modern Western literature of restraint, of stunted emotion and stunted prose.
The whole room was dedicated to death and the vacuum it brings with it. The death of Mary Hogarth and Little Nell was likened to the death of Dickens himself in an exhibit, ’The Empty Chair’, Gad’s Hill–Ninth of June 1870, a print of an engraving by Samuel Luke Fildes. Apparently, this haunting image of the author’s absence influenced Van Gogh who also famously painted an empty chair too, to play with the idea of absence and presence. I am an admirer of both Dickens and Gogh, so this creative correspondence was highly engaging.
After I had looked at the empty chair, I myself fell into the empty chair in the room. I have had that leg operation and I needed a rest for the niggling pain in my shin but I was very pleased that it wasn’t that bad over the past few days and I am improving on the strength in the leg. The volunteer very kindly cleared it and gave it to me. An elderly lady passing by me looked at me conspiratorially and fanned herself, evidently in the throes of a hot flush.
My friend and I read a children’s book together in the book corner to do with a Jewish woman called Eliza who had written to complain to Dickens about his representation of the Jewish Fagin. The children’s book was intended to show it as an example of social transformation and atonement for wrong to a people. I did wonder to myself what Dickens would have made of me writing to him as an Indian to address the wrongs that he had done to our people in his writing (“The Perils of Certain English Prisoners” for instance showed his lack of sympathy for the Indian Mutiny). What was interesting about the book is that we think these kind of debates about identity are a mark of ‘woke culture’, when we have been having these debates for centuries. And still racism persists. Because people will not wake up from oppression, prejudice and injustice.
In the upper floor, we talked about the influence of the raven in Barnaby Rudge upon Edgar Allen Poe. And whether ravens could actually talk!
On the way out, Ollie and the other staff gave us a warm farewell. It was a nice ending to a beautiful visit. I remarked to my friend that I was inspired again to read the novels of this master. Looking around at the lived reality and material objects and scenes that had given form to the works had really enriched my understanding of the memories of reading and being in the mind of Dickens. The experience was invigorating, incredible, intimate.
Eija-Liisa Ahtila, “The Power of Trees”
Exhibition at Kew Gardens Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art
Running from April 12 to September 14, 2025
Review by Dr. Suneel Mehmi (first version of an exhibition review for Plantcurator.com)
Images courtesy of Kew Gardens.
What is a portrait of a tree? And what can such a portrait do? What can a tree portrait tell us about ourselves as humans and our systems of representing ourselves and nature? These are some of the questions behind the Finnish visual artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s exhibition ‘The Power of Trees’ at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art at Kew Gardens.
A prominent – and spectacular – piece in the exhibition Ahtila’s Horizontal–Vaakasuora offers the living video portrait of a 30-metre-tall spruce in Finland’s boreal forest. The tree is shown as a sublime horizontal, subverting our intuitive perceptions of how to portray a tree and highlighting how the limitations of the film frame can shape understanding since the tree could not be captured as a great vertical but had to be rendered horizontally to capture its majesty.
Alongside the installation are Ahtila’s preparatory works, Anthropomorphic Exercises in Film, which are going to be seen for the first time in the country at Kew. Anthropomorphic Exercises in Film are a series of sketches which cast the trees as human characters in movie scenes. The conception is to foreground and analyse our human ways of seeing through film, one of the forms of representation that dominate our understanding of the world around us.
What I found to be an especially stimulating artwork is Point of View/With a Human. There is a step and in front of it, there are three sections on the tree. The fourth section at the top is a mirror in which we look into. Is this artwork a ladder of the tree into the self? The tree as a spiritual guide for the recognition of the self? Or (even at the same time), a puncturing of human arrogance as you step to look at your face in the top branches of the tree? An insight that our sight and our vision of nature is based on narcissism and ego? That we can we only see ourselves in nature? Nature as ourselves?
Finnish art has traditionally been preoccupied with fragments rather than wholes as we learn from the exhibition curatorial note. What is the artwork saying about human beings as a fragment of nature, as part of nature’s collection of fragments? The fragmented self of human beings in the world of nature?
I found Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s exhibition “The Power of Trees” to be a very well conceptualised thought experiment into how we represent the outside world of nature, but also how we represent the inner world of ourselves through filmic representations. How a portrait and character is built. It is an art of the tree that allows us to know ourselves and the limitations and fabrications of our self-knowledge. The exhibition is playful, earnest, important and stimulating and worth not just one, but repeated visits to tease out its subtlety. After you see it, when you look next at at tree in art, you will definitely look at it differently. And perhaps at yourself too.
Eija-Liisa Ahtila, “The Power of Trees” exhibition at Kew Gardens Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art, running from April 12 to September 14, 2025
Dr. Suneel Mehmi
NB: For non-commercial public discussion of the artwork as an independent researcher and volunteer, quotations from sources are intended as ‘fair use’. My interpretations are to be freely shared but to be used with credit as my intellectual property. My interpretations do not reflect any consensus or any other person at any of the places that I work or volunteer. They are my own views.
Summary and Ways of Introducing the Themes of the Exhibition
Horizontal–Vaakasuora offers an awe-inspiring portrayal of a 30-metre-tall spruce in Finland’s boreal forest. Complete with the sounds of a creaking trunk and birdsong, this living portrait captures the majesty of this ancient tree while challenging our perceptions of the natural world.
Accompanying the installation are Ahtila’s preparatory works, Anthropomorphic Exercises in Film, making their UK debut at Kew.
(Kew website)
Global warming inspired her to move from making human dramas to portraits of the trees: ‘Changes in the environment and nature’ (Note: the whole exhibition is about change and transformation – nature changing into the human – as global warming makes the human change into nature. It is an environmental reversal. In Creating Character/With Rain, this is emphasised since ‘the trees are gradually transformed into anthromorphic figures using small deliberate changes’ (exhibition curation label). In the last still frame, the character appears to hold a small gun – she is transforming the tree into a violent character and a killer – a reversal of roles since we are the killers of the trees. In Action: Stumble – the tree falls over like it is dead – the trees are facing extinction.)
The installations included in Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Ecologies of Drama traced a central question posed throughout her work: how have drama and narrative historically been constructed, and how might we envision their new forms?
Many of Ahtila’s most recent works, including Studies on the Ecology of Drama 1, directly investigate how humans could move away from an anthropocentric perspective and suggest that our narratives about the world around us may be powerful tools in that effort.
“How to depict living things? How to approach them? How to convey a different way of being, another being’s world? How to make it into a continuous event that becomes part of our idea of reality?”
Most video works by Finnish visual artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila take place on multiple screens, producing different vantage points of a story simultaneously. She intentionally floods or overwhelms the viewer’s senses in order to produce a strong emotional impact. Instead of following the traditional moving image script, Ahtila explores and innovates on modes of presenting a state of mind or other condition.
Interview with the Artist: Relevant Quotes with Notes
I am questioning what can be done with moving image, and what characterizes this specific medium (Note: the focus is on exploring film through the trees, not the trees through the film, perhaps. Although there is, of course, both).
Moving image also presents itself as the language of our global culture (Note: Film is described as a language – an analysis of language is the foundation – see notes below on Horizontal. It is interesting therefore, the piece where the trees are conversing in the film stills – Conversation Edit 1. It is almost as though she is saying that the trees have their own language. See Horizontal again – she says the tree is breathing and is therefore linked to language – the trees are seen as actors with lines and this may reflect that she is trying to show us the hidden language of the trees, some awareness of the recent scientific suppositions that trees have a language. Conversation Edit 1 is splitting up and bringing together the two trees in conversation – about the connection and disconnection that language imposes, the difference between a dialogue and a monologue. In the last shot, when we confront the tree, is there an implication of the language between humans and the tree and the language of film? Are we talking to the tree and it is talking to us? The language in the piece is entirely invisible in each scene – it is the table that gives the indication that the conversation is happening, so it is not implausible to think that we are talking to the tree and the tree to us).
The moving image has become the most popular means of representing our surroundings and society. It has become our central medium of presenting the world. But to the same degree the medium shows the world to us, it hides other parts. A specific perspective and a particular version of looking at the world are imposed. It is inevitable to ask: Who should be allowed to perform in this image of our world that we create? Who can be a protagonist? To whom/what do we grant the status of an actor? (Note – She is questioning why we humans should be the actors and our particular vision of the world should be imposed).
How do we picture the world around us? And on a bigger scale, how do we picture this planet? (The idea of getting an overall picture that emerges from the fragments – look at the composition of Horizontal as the distinct parts become a greater whole).
What is your dramaturgic intention behind a multiple-screen setting?
To play with the linear perspective and the order it implies – and the viewers’ omnipotence. I’m aiming at creating a cinematic space in which screens interact with each other, making use of the space between the screens, in which the viewers are situated. The viewer enters a state in which she or he is never able to see everything at the same time as things occur in the room. It changes their position as privileged viewers. There are several ways of seeing, not one defined path or angle from which to look at the action. The setting denies a singular perspective of things, or a specific order of how knowledge is acquired. It also emphasizes the fact that we have to make choices about how we want to look at certain things. (Note – the puncture of the illusion of human omnipotence and human ego in their perspectives as a result).
In “Horizontal” you created a film portrait of a spruce tree, in six different parts. What led you to the idea and what message were you trying to convey?
The work originated in the shooting of The Annunciation, from 2010. In its production we needed to shoot first landscapes and then trees. When we confronted the task of shooting a tall tree, we were faced with many restrictions – first with the camera, and then with the idea of a picture of a tree. With the film camera and its aspect ratio one can only capture a part of a tree. When backing off, it becomes no longer a portrait of a single spruce, but the picture of a landscape. Using a wide-angle lens produces a distortion effect, which no longer results in an image of the spruce, but in an account of the mechanism of optics.
In 2011, I made the drawing series entitled Anthropomorphic Exercises on Film based on this observation and the limitations the camera mechanism poses for visual recording of our surroundings. Then I thought I might as well take the challenge seriously and make a moving image piece of the attempt to make a portrait of a tree. It is a long story, but to make it short: We shot a 30 meter tall spruce in six parts and presented it in a human space, horizontally, since otherwise it would not have fit inside. That’s how the name Horizontal originated. The more we got immersed in this task, working with technical equipment, that has been made as an extension to human perception, the more we ended up seeing ourselves and the mechanisms of both the machine and the idea.
Research Notes (Secondary Reading and my Ideas about them)
She has often probed individual identity and the boundaries of the subject in relation to the external world.
(Note: In this exhibition, she is probing the boundaries of the subject through the limitations imposed by their vision and human perspective).
Using the visual language of cinema, Ahtila presents large-scale installations with split-screen projections on multiple panels. These viewing conditions, with their simultaneously charged vantage points, break the idea of cinematic perspective and construct an experience of several co-existing times and spaces for being.
(Note: is the tree video in sections a collection of different times and spaces for the being of the tree? What about the overall unity which connects these different sections? They have a screen continuity if not a physical and temporal continunity. The theory of the gestalt, perhaps the suggestion that we falsely experience the whole even though the parts radically differ from each other, as in the construction of the tree where we don’t scrutinise the great difference in different branches and leaves, etc.? )
2.
In her earlier works, she dealt with the topic of unsettling human dramas at the center of personal relationships…
Although Ahtila’s films do include more than one character, they tend to focus on the internal experience of just one person. Her work seems to be more about studying and understanding an individual’s subjective experience, and how the influences around individuals shape who they are and what they do, and shape their unconscious selves. She is greatly interested in the factors that go into the construction of personal identity, and in how fluid that construct can be.
(Notes – then the portraits of trees are standing in for the psychological selves of nature from that early interest in portraying humans. Are they studies of our our psychology through the trees, how the trees influence our personalities? Yes, because they show the trees adopting human traits – when we look in the mirror of Point of View/With a Human, we literally put our personality into the tree since we look at ourself as a personality. Finland is known as being the happiest country in the world and this is precisely because of the connection of the Finnish to nature and the trees – in other words, the trees have built the national psyche).
3.
HORIZONTAL is a six-channel moving portrait of a living spruce tree.
The attempt to film a spruce tree brings the portrayer face to face with the technical apparatus constructed as an extension of the human eye and perception. It also invites us to consider the preconditions of anthropocentric dramaturgy and the valuations it engenders in images and in the order of representation. It is a record of its existence as a living organism, or perhaps more to the point, a presentation of the difficulty of perceiving and recording a spruce tree with the methods of visual documentation invented by humans.
Suneel’s Interpretations
Horizontal–Vaakasuora
– The tree is projected onto a rectangular wall, a human structure.
– She is a former professor at the Department of Time and Space-based Art at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts (Finland). She breaks up the tree into conceptual packets of space and time through the filming – the conceptual analysis of the tree through the fields of space/time. Is there a link with Einstein’s view of the universe as a space/time continuum and of discrete space time fields? Is this a cosmological vision of the tree?
– The Finnish word ‘kuusi’ means the number six and ‘spruce’ – the tree is in six sections. Lingual play exploring the multidimensionality of words and their many different meanings in the video installation which suggests that the multidimensionality of the tree is evolving from an idea of the multiplicity of meanings within words and signs. They shot when it was windy – wind as breath possibly, and the link to language. She says in the video: the tree is moving and it is ‘breathing’ which would add evidence for this interpretation. (‘Through her cinematic work, she studies the structure of images and language’ – https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/eija-liisa-ahtila/ )
– ‘All these facts are comforting and calming’ – the movement in the high wind gives calm and repose – this is what the Finnish answer to being the happiest nation is supposed to be. That whatever life throws at you, there is calm and repose in nature.
Point of View/With a Human
– Is it a ladder of the tree into the self? The tree as a spiritual guide for the recognition of the self?
– Or (even at the same time), a puncturing of human arrogance as you step to look at your face in the top branches of the tree? That our sight and our vision of nature is based on narcissism and ego? Can we only see ourselves in nature? Nature as ourselves?
– The fragments: Finnish art has traditionally been preoccupied with fragments rather than wholes (exhibition curatorial note). What is it saying about human beings as a fragment of nature, as part of nature’s collection of fragments? The fragmented self of human beings in the world of nature?
– In the mirror, we are moving. We are not completely still and this is impossible. Again, this is about the moving image. Whereas the artwork of the tree is completely still and calm – a comment about the different states of being, the different time register’s between the tree’s slow movements and our own movements? If so, there is an ambiguity – because we appear to be still in the mirror. So there is an illusion of human stillness amidst the stillness of the tree, a false mirroring of nature from the human. In fact, we merge in the mirror with the tree. It is a moment of connection of a sort, but a connection that is dictated by our human frames of time (the mistaken assumption that we can ever be completely still).
– The arbitrariness of vision: Some are too tall to look in the mirror, some too short. There is an arbitrary vision of the human at the top of the tree which is not even accessible to all – is this a comment about the politics of cinema and the moving image? The rigidity and inaccessibility of the moving image?
Themes
Fragments – Finnish artists focused on fragments of nature. The frames of a video are fragments that build up into a larger whole that moves like the moving image – this relies on a trickery of sight since we can only see a certain number of frames per second. Our vision is based on illusion as well as our impression and understanding of the greater whole, such as our impression of the planet Earth and the way we see its nature.
Portraits – what are portraits showing? Why do they show what they show? Action portraits of the trees as they move in human gestures – what it means to make the trees protagonists of the action. In Point of View/With a Human, the human portrait we actually make ourselves through our reflection in the mirror – we are active constructors of these portraits of ourselves in nature. The point is that the portrait is not ‘real’ in any sense – it is merged fictitiously with the tree. Our portraits are determined by context and influence with nature.
The Inhuman and the Just: If the trees are portraits, they have no discernible gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age, etc. They are purely green. In Horizontal, this is a glaring comparison between the human figure that provides the scale as this person has an obvious gender and ethnicity and age. In these images that represent the moving image, we are seeing the representation of an inhuman and impossibly just world which destroys our vision and its discrimination. So, the portraits actually show something that resists the limitations of human vision. If the whole exhibition is a criticism of human vision and its limitations, then there is an optimistic message about what we could achieve if we transcended those limitations.
Criticism of her Project
But a question remains, glaring, refusing to be dismissed: who cares about the human-centered perspective of the traditional cinematic apparatus? Why devote this energy to dismantling an anachronism? It’s like mounting a critique against the normalizing effects upon intellectual production of the codex book format. Surely intellectuals have worse things to worry about. The question has serious ramifications. The mainstream model of narrative film certainly remains in force, arguably more powerful than ever. But its dispersal across a plethora of screens and formats, and its integration in multiple interfaces and consumer technologies, in a way has already transcended the limits of human perception. This pervasive decentralization of the apparatus for mediating audiovisual commodities belongs to the wider process of colonizing and redeveloping the human lifeworld, creating ever new domains of exploitation and accumulation. The ultimate product of this process is a new mode of subjectivity, a form of life whose conditions are not determined according to the physical needs of the human species, but established by the demands of deregulated, globalized capital.
FLOWERS – FLORA IN CONTEMPORARY ART & CULTURE
12 February – 5 May 2025, the Saatchi Gallery
Review by Dr. Suneel Mehmi. Images courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery with permission granted to reuse. This is an unpublished first draft for the Plant Curator website – https://plantcurator.com/
https://www.saatchigallery.com/exhibition/flowers-flora-in-contemporary-art-amp-culture
An inspiration for the ages and a fount of creativity, flowers have been the originating force, subject and detail of the masterpieces of all cultures. A colossus of endeavour and love, the flower exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery celebrates the contribution – and the omnipresence – of these unparalleled objects of beauty up to and including the present moment. The achievement? To have made a discriminating incision into the ubiquity of the flower in art so that the satisfactory slice can be served up – and digested.
Ranging across two floors which house large-scale installations, technically innovative videography, paintings, graphic design, textiles and photography, over 500 unique artworks and objects form the display. Organisation across this wealth of material is found in nine sections which deal with topics such as fashion, books and film, and representations of the flowers in the work of emerging contemporary artists.
In one room, we find the bespoke installation piece by Rebecca Louise Law, made up of over 100,000 dried flowers that have been salvaged from the wasteful society. A creation of sublimity from rejection which can be viewed from the floor or from above in the balcony. Another space has been transformed into an innovative and interactive digital projection by French artist Miguel Chevalier where we move the flowers and, in turn, they move us. A virtual garden of the imagination.
There is a mixture of justifiably perennial sources of delight such as Boticelli’s Primavera and the designs of William Morris alongside the unknown and uncontemplated work of others around the globe. Highlights include the 3D bronze sculpture of Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ by Rob and Nick Carter, where the viewing experience of the artwork is renewed (and given another dimension, if the pun is forgiven), Anna Von Freyburg’s gloriously coloured textile interpretation of a Dutch still life painting, Vivienne Westwood’s sensational floral costumes and Ann Carrington’s collection of finds in silver and cutlery for her shining and awe inpiring sculptures of remodification and metamorphosis.
What the exhibition succeeds in doing well is to sting the monkey of the mind so that she flickers across the branches of the canopy, forever at all moments looking for new paths of exploration and into new thoughts. There is so much beauty, so much food for thought.
What struck me in particular was the constant oscillation and the influence of the flower on the female body and the female body on the flowers. And how this dynamic has been woven into art and culture. Women have been understood as flowers, however we may interpret that equation. The exhibition suggests that works such as Mucha’s ‘La Rose’ give the woman flower the aura of power, the transcendence of a domestic role. In Gary Hume’s ‘Two Blooms, Grey Fields’, we are advised to see human faces in the flowers, a coupling of minds.
Another theme that emerged was the relationship between violence and the flowers. Sometimes, ‘flower power’ was an antidote to the oppressive state and the military as we see in photographs, such as Bernie Boston’s image of George Harris sticking carnations into gun barrels during the demonstrations against the Vietnamese war in 1967. In Wole Lagunju’s reinterpretation of the violence of ‘Judith with the Head of Holofernes’, we see flowers from the cultural iconography of the Yoruba which invigorates a postcolonial approach to real history.
As with all subjects of art, it was interesting to see the pull between the abstract representations of flowers, such as Damien Hirst’s ‘Valium’ and the figurative brilliances of art such as Janet Pulcho’s ‘The Dream of Love’ which was painted last year.
To end the exhibition on emerging voices was infinitely pleasing. A demonstration that the fascination with the flower and its beauty drives contemporary art and will be the future for art for time to come.
Immensely enjoyable and productive for a creative mind, ‘Flowers’ at the Saatchi Gallery is a big and delicious fish to have caught and to feast upon. I spent three hours in each of the spaces hoovering everything up. Beautiful variety, stylish presentation of the pieces, the experience was like an entry in the kaleidoscope of the senses. I learnt much, I contemplated much, I hungered much for the beauty of some of the pieces. My overall impression was of a shining, irresistibly coloured flower which emerges from the dark to cast its wonder upon a world of hearts.
Silk Roads – British Museum Exhibition
Exhibition / 26 September 2024 – 23 February 2025
An attempt to overcome the simplistic, exoticised and orientalised view of the Silk Roads, which created a first globalised economy and world, the Silk Roads exhibition at the British Museum is an exciting, revisionary and thought-provoking array of objects and materials.
The story of the exhibition is told elegantly and clearly: that this is not just the story of one single road, but of many. That this is not just the story of silk. This is the epic story and journey of connections, countless. How the Silk roads influenced histories and cultures across the world as ideas spread and economic trade transformed into a cultural exchange of ideas. One beautiful example is the spread of Buddhism from India across the Silk Roads, the belief system that still shapes much of the world today. Another I hadn’t heard of was the Sogdian whirl which came to China, an example of how ideas and bodies were changed and charged through the interaction with diversity and difference.
The networks explored through the objects create an astonishing encompassing of craft, materials and locations, from Tang Chinese ceramics exports intended for ports in the Middle East to garnets from India found in Suffolk. And so, our mental networks of assumed histories are updated, surprised and stimulated.
Intriguing stories of the personalities of the Silk Roads are showcased in the exhibition. There is the English smuggler, Willibald and a Chinese princess of Legend who unfolded the secrets of producing silk to her new kingdom. There are many such enticing morsels throughout. The reality of silk as currency, and the tales of fabulous places, such as Tang China with its capital Chang’an. This was for a time the largest of the cities in the world, boasting a population of one million people.
The exhibition has diversity. For instance, it describes the foreign populations that mingled in Tang China’s cosmopolitan cities who are displayed as figurines from the time.
Treasures abound. Absolutely and astonishingly sublime, spectacular, sensational. Indian art, a whalebone casket. There was an amazing dagger and sheath decorated with gold, garnets and glass alongside a gold shoulder clasp with garnets and glass. So supremely beautiful and perfect. A wonderful decorated gold bowl from Romania featuring a griffin mauling a goat, deadly and dazzling. There are treasures from the Dunhuang ‘Library Cave’ which contained some 70,000 manuscripts, paintings, textiles and other objects.
Mysteries abound too, the temptation to delve and discover, to explore. The unknown meaning of the ‘comma-shaped’ jade ornament in the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago. Shipwrecks with cargoes of brilliant treasures, the mental journey as you imagine the crew’s connections and intentions, as you travel in thought with them through history.
Some favourites in the exhibition for me were the display showing how Sanskrit was read in Chinese, as my family comes from India and my middle name is in Sanskrit, and the display on how geometric designs were diffused throughout Islam. I also particularly enjoyed looking at the treasures salvaged from the shipwrecks. The gift of the sea and of discovery.
The exhibition has contemporary reference as it tells us as we exit, that the connections forged on the Silk Roads will continue to shape the present and the future.
Fabulous as a journey through space and time, the exhibition really enlivens history. And it serves as a useful corrective to the modern day assumption that in the old times the people were unenlightened, unadventurous, prejudiced and isolated. There is a pluralistic and nuanced feeling to the presentation, to its revisionist spirit and to its celebration of human diversity and cultural exchange. A beautiful story that is told with beautiful things and beautiful people. Amazing.
diary of a lone man 