Open Eye Projects - Exhibitions & Screenings
Guided by the Echo - Nelson Guzmán
An exhibition of work in progress.
18 July - 9 August 2008
Edge Hill Train Station, Liverpool
Since I do not think an intrinsic property of evil can be defined, I am, rather, concerned with tracing what evil does to us. If designating something as evil is a way of marking the fact that it shatters our trust in the world, it’s that effect, more than the cause, which I want to examine. Susan Neiman (author and philosopher).
Presented by Open Eye Projects and Metal Culture, ‘Guided by the Echo’ was the first UK exhibition by Colombian artist Nelson Guzmán and the culmination of Guzmán’s 3-month residency in Liverpool.
Nelson Guzmán is interested in the idea of evil and the ways in which we think and talk about it. Arriving in Liverpool in April 2008 for a 3-month residency, he was struck by the ways in which violent and traumatic events were marked and memorialised in public spaces. The badges worn for lost children, minutes of silence and improvised roadside tributes stood in stark contrast to what he describes as the “daily turnover of victims and atrocities” in the news of his own country.
His project ‘Guided by the echo’ centred on the visible and tangible traces left in the wake of such events. His work contrasted the myth-making of the tabloid media with the physical traces to be found at the ‘scene of the crime’. Dealing solely with these traces, Guzmán made no attempt to find the truth behind them. His work poses a series of tentative questions - he seeks neither to moralise nor to explain.
Guzmán’s project began with the stories he found in local tabloid newspapers; the emotional, sensational language of which, made the subjects seem distant, unreal, almost fictional. Following these stories, Guzmán visited the sites themselves, sometimes finding physical proof - a gunshot on a pub sign or remnants of a memorial constructed from ribbons - sometimes finding nothing.
The exhibition brought together a diverse range of material, such as newspapers, maps, photographs and notes. They allow the viewer to see through the artist’s eyes, as a Colombian artist in Liverpool, an outsider navigating a new city by the sites and stories that absolve reason and understanding; where the word ‘evil’ is the simplest answer.
The photographs in Guzmán’s work are silent, static. Their reticence, however, does not permit the viewer to escape into the familiarity of the everyday, nor into the fantasy of film noir. How can we deal with a reality that is continually echoed and pre-empted by the images of news and entertainment? Is the result that we are simply anesthetised?
A collaboration between Open Eye Projects and Metal Culture, supported by Visiting Arts. Thanks to Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and C3 Imaging for their generous support.
