Gratuitous Little Weight
A photographic examination of event landscape.
Madeline Djerejian, Nayan Kulkarni, Clement Page Curated by Berit Fischer
2 March – 31 March 2007
Private view: Thursday 1 March 6-9pm
Talk: Thursday 15 March 6.30pm at Standpoint, the curator in conversation with the artists.
Gratuitous Little Weight
How can we conceive of space as a stage for men and not merely a somewhat nostalgic object of contemplation?
Paul Virilio
Gratuitous Little Weight responds to Paul Virilio’s urbanist vision of history as an event landscape in which the persistence of
material moves to the cognitive persistence of vision. Calling upon the mechanisms of memory and documentation, the tension
between what an image reveals and what we know about it, Gratuitous Little Weight is a photographic investigation on the
aesthetics of disappearance, the elusive and ephemeral world of the finite.
Madeline Djerejian
Guardians & Sentries, 2001/2006 Djerejian’s photographic series portrays poetically uncanny landscapes, some of ominous
architectural remnants and others of mysterious physiography. However the alluring landscapes represent imprints of a rather
un-poetic historic past, namely battlefields, pillboxes or bunkers in Normandy or Verdun. As the viewer you are drawn into a
tension between the eerie yet intriguing aesthetic of the image, and the callous reality of its content.
Madeline Djerejian lives and works in New York and Wales. Her works have been widely exhibited in the US, Germany and the UK
and are most recently included in the publication Frozen Tears 3 (UK).
Nayan Kulkarni
Still Places Series, 2004/2006 examines the viewing process as an experience, created through slight digital anamorphosis
of the photographic images, in which the single vanishing point is exaggerated through strong converging linear compositions.
Sites of barren richness inform the photographic approach. The landscapes are sites with strong signs of historical human
interaction, like SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest) preservation areas, traces of former military defence zones or pole
marks of ancient pilgrims way for safe passage. “They expose a kind of emotional atrophy or sublimation of the body into their
expanse”. (NK)
Nayan Kulkarni is a British artist who graduated from The Slade. His diverse practice includes photography, video installation
and project based works in the public realm.
Clement Page
Topologies, 2003 is a series of photographic investigations into cityscapes of areas of London that were heavily bombed during
World War II, and that have since become marginalized or partly ghettoized zones. These historically loaded areas are
photographically captured when the former architecture and usage are on the verge of complete disappearance through new
development. “These zones become the architectural and historical unconscious of the city”. (CP) The use of long exposures
and very slow film allow the viewer to investigate, in the sharpest detail, an uncanny Topology of urban history.
Clement Page works with film, painting and photography and has shown extensively internationally as well as nationally at
Lisson Gallery, VTO and Cell Projects.