THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
The first time I saw work from Darren Almond’s ‘Terminus’ project I was unaware of the specific nature of the objects before me. Standing in front of a pair empty bus shelters, with no obvious reference to place or history, they existed only as a sign of impossible transportation, silent amid the howling intensity of the Royal Academy of London’s ‘Apocalypse’ exhibition in 2000. In the scheme of attention-getting contemporary art, Almond’s practice, which includes photography, film, installation and site-specific work, sits apart from the rest. His work is situated within the ontology of disappearance or the un-representable; of objects being removed from their place of origin, where customary experiences and the evidence of time and memory are turned inside out.
In June of this year Almond exhibited three bodies of work, collectively titled Night + Fog after Alain Renais’ 1955 documentary film on Auschwitz. The show was installed in Galerie Max Hetzler’s ‘temporary’ space, an enormous former East Berlin light globe factory in the suburb of Wedding. Although being conceived at separate times, the works formed a powerful visual and conceptual cluster of references to war, environment and memory. In an amplification of the ‘Apocalypse’ show, in this version ‘Terminus’ was comprised of fourteen bus stations, recently salvaged from the town of Oświęcim in southern Poland. These shelters situated us at the site of the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz, as Oświęcim was called during the German occupation. In Hetzler’s gallery the warehouse walls also displayed fifteen landscape photographs of the Siberian nickel mines of Norilsk, a closed city controlled by a mining company that produces ‘some of the largest amounts of sulphur dioxide on the planet’.1 These... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline