Untitled (2 10am), Ilford Pan F Plus onto Ilford MG ART 300 paper, Bankley Gallery, Manchester, 2016.
The installation ‘Untitled (2:10am)’ explores discontinuity through the repetition and disintegration of motifs relevant to the post-communist condition, in an attempt to disrupt experiences of time as a sequence of chronometric units. The work’s inspiration is the closing scenes of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1927 film ‘October’, which marks the moment of the Bolshevik victory (2:10am) with a montage of clocks from across the globe, thus foregrounding time as the medium of revolutionary action. The photographs that comprise these photo-series reference clocks produced by the Jantar, Politik and Ruhla companies, and the architectural principles such as tselostnost (wholeness), svetloe (radiance), prostota (clarity) and obraz (iconicity) that informed the architecture of the former Eastern Bloc up to the 1989 collapse of communism. Two grids of photographs face each other on the end walls of an otherwise empty gallery. The score of Morton Feldman’s work for piano ‘Triadic Memories’ (1981) determines the order and arrangement of the photographs in the installation. Phrases for the player’s left-hand determine one photo-series, which faces the other series, whose order is determined by the phrases for the player’s right-hand, across the empty gallery space. Within Feldman’s piece, phrases repeat and vary to the point of disintegration and stasis. In a similar manner, upon the walls of the gallery, montages recur and modulate before collapsing out of sequence.