Simon Norfolk: For Most of It I Have No Words: Genocide, Landscape, Memory
30 March - 10 June 2012
Simon Norfolk’s extraordinary body of work, For Most Of It I Have No Words(1999), investigates what Norfolk regards as genocidal events of the twentieth century, reflecting on the act of forgetting as physical reminders of the atrocities disappear from the landscape and away from our consciousness.
It begins in Rwanda (1994) where partially clad skeletons and violated refuges still bear witness to individual lives and deaths.
The images travel back through time, drawing a thread through an array of twentieth century events: Cambodia’s Year Zero in 1975; the free bombing zones developed from 1962 in Vietnam; the use of the defoliant Agent Orange; extermination camps in Auschwitz; the bombing of Dresden; the mass graves of the Ukraine; and the fields of Anatolia where Armenians were marched to their deaths.
The series concludes in the Omaheke Desert, where the sands of the Namibian desert have erased the final traces of Herero nomadic people, killed under German colonial rule in 1904.
Originally completed in 1998, and exhibited at Open Eye Gallery the following year, this project marked a turning point in Norfolk’s practice.
Simon Norfolk was born in Nigeria in 1963. He currently lives and works in Brighton.
Simon Norfolk’s extraordinary body of work, For Most Of It I Have No Words(1999), investigates what Norfolk regards as genocidal events of the twentieth century, reflecting on the act of forgetting as physical reminders of the atrocities disappear from the landscape and away from our consciousness.
It begins in Rwanda (1994) where partially clad skeletons and violated refuges still bear witness to individual lives and deaths.
The images travel back through time, drawing a thread through an array of twentieth century events: Cambodia’s Year Zero in 1975; the free bombing zones developed from 1962 in Vietnam; the use of the defoliant Agent Orange; extermination camps in Auschwitz; the bombing of Dresden; the mass graves of the Ukraine; and the fields of Anatolia where Armenians were marched to their deaths.
The series concludes in the Omaheke Desert, where the sands of the Namibian desert have erased the final traces of Herero nomadic people, killed under German colonial rule in 1904.
Originally completed in 1998, and exhibited at Open Eye Gallery the following year, this project marked a turning point in Norfolk’s practice.
Simon Norfolk was born in Nigeria in 1963. He currently lives and works in Brighton.
