BORDERLANDS

Arts University Bournemouth, 2009

‘Borderlands’ acknowledges the edge of systems and the hinterland between places and social classifications; they are areas of flux and sometimes conflict. The curation of this exhibition is an examination of this relationship. Two artists and two writers are navigating their ways around, through discussion, the joining of each other’s standpoints.

The exhibition and relationship between the two artists, Christian Edwards and Tom Hall and their work is one of boundaries. The work is treated as a collaborative curation, shifting and testing the borders of two ways of thinking. The forcing of work together is to deal with difference.

An ‘Unreal reconstruction’ of the library repository in Dallas, consist of basic elements that the artist feels describe the room from which JFK was assassinated and the explosive political act that took place. It is to be built out of cardboard, materials linked to storage or packaging and the artifice of the theatre and construct a space within the space. The room will not be representation of the actual space but will be designed from hearsay, media coverage and conspiracy plots of the assassination. The work looks to a collective idea of space and events and draws contemporary parallels to the public’s construction of the terrorist here. We do have a ‘feeling’ of what it is and as we begin to draw the threads of perception towards ‘a’ real thing media and discrimination fills in the blanks of a fictionalised truth.

A series of ideological islands are a reference to the separation between an idea of utopian ‘place’ and homemade attempts to reconstruct it. The work comprises of drawings and photographed constructions made from materials found in the home: from the contents of kitchen cupboards to domestic furniture. The islands set out the possibility of a transformation of space and physical ‘stuff’ through the act making and re-presenting objects.

The artists have invited two writers to have a parallel discussion on the subject of Borderlands. The two writers were identified as people who would take defined positions relating to the two processes employed by the artists and foster debate. The text will come from their discussions.

Postcode Warfare in Contemporary Urban Britain by Frank Brown – Commissioned by Tom Hall – September 2008