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story perpetuated ‘the existing narrativisation of absurdity around Egypt’ at a time when ‘nothing [made] sense to the outside world’. The story of Menes was predominantly reported by foreign media outlets. It became clickbait, gaining the spurious hashtag #spyduck, and was relayed through headlines rife with puns: ‘Eyes on storks?’, ‘Fowl play?’ The media was not only concerned with the ‘absurdity’ of the imprisonment of the bird (an act whose motive was later explained by the ‘arresting’ of icer as one of safety rather than genuine reprimand or symbolism) but also of its prompt demise once released. It was as though the death – moreover, at the hands of local villagers – proved the inanity of the exercise. In Egypt, the unfolding political events between 2011 and 2013 justi ied the suspicion of a spying stork, but western media simply used the story as an endorsement of their pre-existing narratives. During the irst days of the 2011 revolution, the Egyptian government shut down access to the internet. In response, a group of developers set up a platform which enabled Egyptians to record voice messages to be automatically posted on Twitter. In Project Speak2Tweet, Amin combines a selection of these audio iles with ilm of abandoned architectural developments across Cairo. Installed on steel beams in a claustrophobic maze, the work reconnects the aural with the physical realm, manifesting a collective archive of the country at a pivotal moment. Project Speak2Tweet initially came together at a time when social media was associated with autonomy and democratic promise. Now, nine years later, these voices not only carry the legacy of their own politics but also those of the platforms used to disseminate them. Aptly installed in the basement galleries sits Operation Sunken Sea, 2018–, a multi-media project in which Amin takes centre stage, positioning herself as a ‘quasi-dictator’. In a ilmed address, the artist outlines her grand plan to ‘solve’ the so-called migration crisis: drain and re-route the Mediterranean Sea. The proposal references numerous 20th-century technoutopian visions surrounding ownership of the landlocked basin – most notably Herman Sörgel’s Atlantropa, which set out to unite Europe and Africa as one continent. Talking to us from her podium, Amin adopts the language and symbolism of these male, ‘megalomaniacal’ narratives. Developed by different proponents across the West, the large-scale interventions were presented as examples of unity and peace rather than colonialism, their ethos of occupation legitimised by the momentum of technological advancement. As an African-Arab woman, Amin restages and usurps their grandiose sense of entitlement: ‘I too will shi geographies … we too shall explore the capabilities of human progress in a feat of poetic engineering and sink the Mediterranean Sea.’ Amin’s work unravels the enmeshed relationship between technologies and the violence they enact. Although seemingly distinct, these three bodies of work overlap and converge, each analysing how certain technological tools have historically, and paradoxically, enabled, legitimised and facilitated protest against authoritarian regimes. At points verging on investigative journalism, Amin’s practice seamlessly shi s across boundaries – of discipline, lexicon, geography and time – in a reversal of power, in a bid to (re)write histories. Kathryn Lloyd is a writer and editor based in London. Ian Land, ‘The Land of Cockaigne: Travels through Brexit’, 2016–19 Towner International Towner Gallery, Eastbourne 6 October to 10 January My introduction to the Towner International was a telling curatorial conjunction. Stuart Middleton’s Motivation and Personality, 2018, casts visitors in the role of cattle. Used clothing – human hides of a sort – is stitched onto a wooden framework to make a spiralling run of passages derived from the livestock-management systems used in slaughterhouses. Such guided routes both calm and control the cows, leaving us to wonder whether that shows genuine concern for their welfare or merely increases the ef iciency of a brutal act. I emerged to discover the source of the distorted and unnatural, yet somewhat animalistic, sounds which accompanied the journey: Benedict Drew’s two-screen ilm installation The Bad Feel Loops, 2019. Drew combines footage abstracted into psychedelic colours with what the curators describe as ‘the use of noise, feedback, rhythm and repetition to invoke … the subjective experience of anxiety … rather than trying to silence it’. The new biennial exhibition arranged by Eastbourne’s Towner Gallery is unusual in being an open-call event with no restrictions other than that work submitted must have been completed in the past ive years. From the 2,400 submissions, 24 artists were selected by an impressively quali ied panel of judges: artist Mike Nelson and curators Polly Staple (Tate) and Noelle Collins (Towner). They chose a mix of well-established names and relative unknowns – including several based in the south-east. Such an arrangement doesn’t facilitate the thematic coherence typically sought by biennales, but the mix of media is closer to that than – say – the results of the Royal Academy’s annual open call: plenty of ilm and installation, and painting present but carrying relatively little impact. The judges opted for work irmly grounded in reality, o en bringing disparate source materials into unusual conjunctions to address geopolitical, environmental and social issues – giving scope for plenty more reasons to be anxious. All of that is found in another two-screen video: Saskia Olde Wolbers’ Pfui – Pish, Pshaw / Prr, 2017, which presents footage shot unof icially over many years by Theodosis Alifrangis, an employee of a Greek oil-spill response company. Extracts from ilms of his everyday work run with voiced-over anecdotes from his notes. Olde-Wolbers mixes the found footage with the 30 Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021
page 33
wave forms of sonar imagery (although derived from Alifrangis’s unsuccessful attempts to salvage a cruise liner, the visuals are suggestive of pollution) with her own ‘liquid visuals’ – shots of models of cruise-ship interiors, covered in iridescent dripping oils. What are we to make of this? The title points the way: it derives, says Olde-Wolbers, from ‘a DH Lawrence letter in which the author abandoned language to express an onomatopoeic anger’. Further conjunctions include The Muses, 2018, in which Ailbhe Ní Bhriain melds early ‘Orientalist’ photography with images of damaged quarry walls; woven into a large tapestry, the work explicitly stages the implication that colonial archives act as a surface record of preservation while belying deeper acts of destruction. In a similar vein, Dutch-Mexican artist Omar Vega Macotela’s Bestiary, 2019, consists of a group of 41 porcelain sheets engraved in a ghostly grey-on-grey, with illustrations taken from books detailing how different cultures have envisaged and dealt with the monstrous. Both Adam Chodzko (Interview AM318) and Maeve Brennan (Pro ile AM406) generate ilms from striking starting points. The former’s Great Expectations, 2015, tells of a joiner giving a set of 200 cabinet-making tools to his son in 1796. His intended successor responded by using them to make a beautiful cabinet – into which he put the tools, never to use them again. Chodzko employs the voices of virtual, anthropomorphised tools to speculate on this simultaneous honouring and subverting of the father’s gi . Brennan’s Listening in the Dark, 2018, starts with the irony that, though the development of wind turbines is motivated by the desire to bene it the natural world by moving away from fossil fuels, they can prove fatal to bats: a pressure drop behind the blades causes chiropteran lungs to explode. The fate of the bats becomes a symbol of how convenient it can be to ignore what we are doing to the environment, and triggers a 43-minute ilm which expands intriguingly from ultrasound detection to the evolutionary ‘arms race’ between bats and moths, whale calls, scienti ic research methods, and how scienti ic breakthroughs – including in geology – change our view of the world. I was also drawn in to the more singular focus of St Leonards-based Ian Land. ‘The Land of Cockaigne: Travels through Brexit’, 2016–19, documents his walk around the coast from Hastings and then to London with the goal of photographing everything except the sea (the medieval Cockaigne is a place of luxury and ease – but imaginary). Knowing that he was traversing leave-voting territory, Land found that ‘the multitude of Keep Out and Private signs which had always been there took on a sinister air, and the irony of walking for many miles on land closer to France than it is to London became overwhelming’. The undercurrent is captured in brooding high-contrast monochromes which home in on, for example, a fence with a section blown down by wind or a house called ‘Utopia’ with a discarded mattress outside. Less anxious contributions of note include Jonathan Baldock’s line-up of a dozen examples from his ceramic ‘Maske’ series, 2019–20 – wittily pushing pareidolia to the limit as they merge masks with emojis – and Rita Evans’s Coil of Days, 2019–20. This ilm of women performing is in line with the artist’s core practice – ‘I make and perform sculptures’, Evans says, ‘that are also playable electro-acoustic instruments and tools’ – and is entrancingly combined with readings for eight women, written in response to each instrument by Amy Lay-Pettifer. In one of these ‘stories of sel hood’ – to quote another – the character explains that ‘we just need some perspective to get high enough to see … If I could live in the mountains most of the time, then I would.’ Yet anxiety remains the keynote as the Towner International inds plenty of ways to show – even in pre-Covid productions – how far we are from Cockaigne. There is comfort and some hope in the informative and imaginative presentations, but if we had the full perspective, would that amount to more than the abattoir comforts afforded to cows? Paul Carey-Kent is a writer and curator based in Southampton. Robert Smithson: Hypothetical Islands Marian Goodman Gallery, London 5 December thru January In 1970, Robert Smithson was preparing to realise an artwork which would cover an island off the coast of Vancouver entirely in shards of broken glass. Within months, he projected, the motion of the tides would have smoothed the sharp edges; in 100 years, he hoped the glass would have been turned back to sand. Days before it was due to be installed, the local government called the project off, citing conservation concerns (Smithson insisted he had thoroughly investigated the barren island to con irm that it was free of wildlife). The project was never realised, and, three years later, Smithson died in a plane crash while photographing another land work. The artwork lives on in drawings and in Smithson’s extensive writings; in art legend and lore, the Glass Island has become a ictional place, a geographical site that materially exists, if only speculatively. Even if the project had gone ahead, it would eventually have been eroded into billions of pieces, reclaimed by the land like Smithson’s more famous (and realised) earthworks, including Spiral Jetty near Salt Lake City, Utah, and Amarillo Ramp in Texas, a comma-shaped mound of rocks and earth that, over time, slopes back down into the ground. Smithson’s preoccupation with islands, explored in this solo exhibition – his irst in London in almost 50 Robert Smithson, Island Project, 1970 Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021 31

story perpetuated ‘the existing narrativisation of absurdity around Egypt’ at a time when ‘nothing [made] sense to the outside world’. The story of Menes was predominantly reported by foreign media outlets. It became clickbait, gaining the spurious hashtag #spyduck, and was relayed through headlines rife with puns: ‘Eyes on storks?’, ‘Fowl play?’ The media was not only concerned with the ‘absurdity’ of the imprisonment of the bird (an act whose motive was later explained by the ‘arresting’ of icer as one of safety rather than genuine reprimand or symbolism) but also of its prompt demise once released. It was as though the death – moreover, at the hands of local villagers – proved the inanity of the exercise. In Egypt, the unfolding political events between 2011 and 2013 justi ied the suspicion of a spying stork, but western media simply used the story as an endorsement of their pre-existing narratives.

During the irst days of the 2011 revolution, the Egyptian government shut down access to the internet. In response, a group of developers set up a platform which enabled Egyptians to record voice messages to be automatically posted on Twitter. In Project Speak2Tweet, Amin combines a selection of these audio iles with ilm of abandoned architectural developments across Cairo. Installed on steel beams in a claustrophobic maze, the work reconnects the aural with the physical realm, manifesting a collective archive of the country at a pivotal moment. Project Speak2Tweet initially came together at a time when social media was associated with autonomy and democratic promise. Now, nine years later, these voices not only carry the legacy of their own politics but also those of the platforms used to disseminate them.

Aptly installed in the basement galleries sits Operation Sunken Sea, 2018–, a multi-media project in which Amin takes centre stage, positioning herself as a ‘quasi-dictator’. In a ilmed address, the artist outlines her grand plan to ‘solve’ the so-called migration crisis: drain and re-route the Mediterranean Sea. The proposal references numerous 20th-century technoutopian visions surrounding ownership of the landlocked basin – most notably Herman Sörgel’s Atlantropa, which set out to unite Europe and Africa as one continent. Talking to us from her podium, Amin adopts the language and symbolism of these male, ‘megalomaniacal’ narratives. Developed by different proponents across the West, the large-scale interventions were presented as examples of unity and peace rather than colonialism, their ethos of occupation legitimised by the momentum of technological advancement. As an African-Arab woman, Amin restages and usurps their grandiose sense of entitlement: ‘I too will shi geographies … we too shall explore the capabilities of human progress in a feat of poetic engineering and sink the Mediterranean Sea.’

Amin’s work unravels the enmeshed relationship between technologies and the violence they enact. Although seemingly distinct, these three bodies of work overlap and converge, each analysing how certain technological tools have historically, and paradoxically, enabled, legitimised and facilitated protest against authoritarian regimes. At points verging on investigative journalism, Amin’s practice seamlessly shi s across boundaries – of discipline, lexicon, geography and time – in a reversal of power, in a bid to (re)write histories. Kathryn Lloyd is a writer and editor based in London.

Ian Land, ‘The Land of Cockaigne: Travels through Brexit’, 2016–19

Towner International Towner Gallery, Eastbourne 6 October to 10 January My introduction to the Towner International was a telling curatorial conjunction. Stuart Middleton’s Motivation and Personality, 2018, casts visitors in the role of cattle. Used clothing – human hides of a sort – is stitched onto a wooden framework to make a spiralling run of passages derived from the livestock-management systems used in slaughterhouses. Such guided routes both calm and control the cows, leaving us to wonder whether that shows genuine concern for their welfare or merely increases the ef iciency of a brutal act. I emerged to discover the source of the distorted and unnatural, yet somewhat animalistic, sounds which accompanied the journey: Benedict Drew’s two-screen ilm installation The Bad Feel Loops, 2019. Drew combines footage abstracted into psychedelic colours with what the curators describe as ‘the use of noise, feedback, rhythm and repetition to invoke … the subjective experience of anxiety … rather than trying to silence it’.

The new biennial exhibition arranged by Eastbourne’s Towner Gallery is unusual in being an open-call event with no restrictions other than that work submitted must have been completed in the past ive years. From the 2,400 submissions, 24 artists were selected by an impressively quali ied panel of judges: artist Mike Nelson and curators Polly Staple (Tate) and Noelle Collins (Towner). They chose a mix of well-established names and relative unknowns – including several based in the south-east. Such an arrangement doesn’t facilitate the thematic coherence typically sought by biennales, but the mix of media is closer to that than – say – the results of the Royal Academy’s annual open call: plenty of ilm and installation, and painting present but carrying relatively little impact. The judges opted for work irmly grounded in reality, o en bringing disparate source materials into unusual conjunctions to address geopolitical, environmental and social issues – giving scope for plenty more reasons to be anxious.

All of that is found in another two-screen video: Saskia Olde Wolbers’ Pfui – Pish, Pshaw / Prr, 2017, which presents footage shot unof icially over many years by Theodosis Alifrangis, an employee of a Greek oil-spill response company. Extracts from ilms of his everyday work run with voiced-over anecdotes from his notes. Olde-Wolbers mixes the found footage with the

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Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021

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