Patti Gaal-Holmes
’into the frameless distance – city of (no) memory’ exhibitions Jack House Gallery, Gallery Art Space Portsmouth, Aspex Gallery Studio 5-22 September 2024
Patti Gaal-Holmes uses analogue photography, film and photobooks to raise questions about identity, exile and memory in a project informed by her father’s escape from Hungary and her attempts to excavate elements of the past through travelling to Budapest and Bratislava,and delving into archives as she searches for traces to narrate the residues of history and memory on film.
The exhibition is three-fold: ‘into the frameless distance’ (Jack House Gallery) focuses on the border crossings by river (swimming across the Danube) and land (Bratislava/Austria border) where the change from being an ‘inhabitant’ to becoming an ‘exile’ provides a key point of focus and an obsessive attempt to document the moments of transition.
‘city of (no) memory’ (Art Space Portsmouth) centres on the artist’s return to her father’s city (Budapest) as she searches for the ‘ghosts’ of the past in a city holding residues of his presence, as well as the personal and political memories of traumatic historic events.
Gaal-Holmes’ 16mm films are included in ‘looking backwards, moving forwards’ (PAX Aspex Residency Studio) which has been taken over by the PAX (Portsmouth Analogue eXperiments) initiative, which also includes works by Evagelia Hagikalfa, Frankie Knight, Jane Shepherd and Vicky Smith.
Gaal-Holmes’ project is informed by (amongst others) the aesthetics and photographic approaches of the Japanese photographers, Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira, particularly their 1960s/70s ‘anti-photography’ works; by personal and political Hungarian histories, by the German writer W. G. Sebald’s search for the ‘nervature of the past’ and by curator, Okwui Enwezor’s conviction that ‘it is our job to think historically about the present, since the present is always embedded in the past’. Here the personal and political, individual and universal intersect, asking what it means to go into exile, fleeing into that ‘frameless distance’ so full of promise, hope and possibility and how we create memories from (no) memory, through a sustained leap of imagination, to recreate the past and tell stories to ourselves in order to make sense of the world.
Further Reading
The suggestion of an echo traced by the touch of a capturing device by Ricardo Reveron Blanco The Incomplete Reimagining of Image Matter by Jelena Jelena StojkovićDATES FOR THE DIARY
5 September – PRIVATE VIEW 16.00 – 18.00 – Art Space Portsmouth 18.00 – 20.00 – Jack House Gallery
8 September – MEET THE PAX ARTISTS Expanded Cinema & Analogue Experiments 14.00 – 16.00 – PAX Aspex Residency Studio
11 September – ARTIST TALK & IN-CONVERSATION 17.00 – 19.00 – Jack House Gallery
13 September – MEET THE PAX ARTISTS Expanded Cinema & Analogue Experiments 18.00 – 21.00 – PAX at Aspex Friday Late
15 September – ROUND TABLE - ‘looking backwards, moving forwards’ 14.00 – 16.00 – Aspex Gallery Join us for an open discussion on the enduring appeal of analogue media & technologies, including the use of archival materials (slides, photographs, films, etc.) and analogue filmmaking in the making of new work. In this way ‘Innovation becomes multidirectional and (re)invention often involves looking backwards in order to move forwards’ (Knowles, 2020, p.6).
19 September - JAPAN PHOTOBOOK EVENING 16.00 – 18.00 - Aspex Gallery with POMPEY DARKROOM An afternoon dedicated to exploring photobooks from the Japan Photobook Collection, held at Arts University Bournemouth, with an introduction to the collection. 19.00 – 20.30 – Talk by Dr Jelena Stojkovic, 'From Photobook to Installation: Japanese Photography in the 1960s and '70s' PAX (Portsmouth Analogue eXperiments) includes work by Patti Gaal-Holmes, Evagelia Hagikalfa, Frankie Knight, Jane Shepherd and Vicky Smith.
