image-event

‘Image-event’ is a phrase referring to Jean Baudrillard's philosophical investigations into photography and the image. Baudrillard examines the image—as in photography, television and the internet—as a disconnection from reality. The image has been severed from the real world taking on its own reality, blurring the lines between truth and simulation. image-event explores themes surrounding memory, particularly in relation to truthfulness. What do images tell us about a situation? Can we ascertain a truthful depiction of an event from an artwork, a photograph? Does it really matter?

The viewer might interpret Anastasia Xirouchakis' photographs as telling a personal narrative. The reflection in the mirror is her mother, the domestic settings are from inside her childhood home and the lung X-rays belong to her grandmother. The viewer may begin to wonder about the meaning of these carefully selected objects and why they seem to stand in for someone absent from view. Somebody in New York loves me. Who are they? The viewer is prompted to connect Xirouchakis' work to relationships of some kind, particularly to the idea of absence. But this is not the whole picture. In fact, Xirouchakis is not so concerned with reconfiguring her past. There is a kind of absurd joke in all of this. Instead the objects could well have been picked up off the street or foraged out of dustbins.

Shortly after the death of her grandfather, Xirouchakis began seeing dead birds everywhere—sometimes two or three times a day. There would be a crooked crow on her doorstep as she left home for work, or a pigeon splattered on the road. She believed there had to be some kind of connection, even searching on Reddit for what it means to see dead birds everywhere. While Xirouchakis recognised that there was likely a rational explanation for this—perhaps she was simply just looking for dead birds—she could not help but wonder.

The artist is drawn to concepts of image association and finding meaning in patterns that randomly occur. Xirouchakis describes apophenia—the tendency to find meaning in unrelated things—as a central subject in her work. She describes herself as a ‘collector of things’. But she does not collect any-thing. She tends to find patterns in the things that she collects, whether discarded toys, skincare masks, rocks, or t-shirts with unusual slogans. This process of selective collecting is central to her tendency to find meaning in seemingly random events. Through the medium of photography, Xirouchakis personifies these objects, placing them in real or imagined situations. She explores the question of how photography can shape a narrative in a distorted or unreliable way. Here, the line between the rational, the spiritual and the pseudo-psychic becomes blurred.

Joseph Beuys built his practice around the myth of an aeroplane crash he experienced while serving in the Luftwaffe, the air force of the German military. After the crash, he was saved by Tartar tribesmen who smeared him with fat and wrapped him in felt to keep him warm. His subsequent practice frequently included themes from this experience. The story, as has come to light, is not true. While some criticize Beuys for basing his practice on a lie, for him it was an essential part of constructing his artistic persona. One could argue that Beuys believed that the story was not a lie at all, but a truth that didn't happen. It was simply a way of exploring the themes in his work that transcended the need for literal truth.

More like living entities than objects, Tanoa Sasraku’s paper sculptures warp and shift over time; sometimes bulging, sometimes retracting. The work is deliberately exposed to the elements, with no glass protecting their fragile surfaces, allowing them to absorb their surroundings. They raise questions about temporality and of vulnerability. Importantly, they assert the fleeting fingerprint of Sasraku’s existence without claiming a permanent timestamp on the landscape.

Like Xirouchakis, Sasraku decodes the world through iconography. The foraging of pigments  from locations in Ghana and across the UK act as a direct geological connection to these places. These are locations with cultural and historical significance to the artist. The pairing of these pigments with pattern-cutting techniques reminiscent of her late father’s fashion designs from the 1980s, or Ghanaian Asafo flags, reconnects the artist with a part of herself that feels absent. Through this process, Sasraku situates herself in a place that she feels is missing. It is an adventure story of self creation. Like piecing together a puzzle, Sasraku draws in materials of personal significance in a lifelong attempt at healing.

In her Mire Horse series, Sasraku explores an event that occurred while walking on Dartmoor, a pastime she often engaged in during her youth. It tells the story of her falling into a bog during one of these walks. As she desperately tried to crawl out of the swell of foul smelling mud and yellowish water, she discovered the body of a rotting horse. Through the process of creating the Mire Horse series, this memory has transcended into a kind of mythical intervention, acting as a turning point in the artist's life. Like Beuys’ plane crash, Sasraku presents the Mire Horse as an origin story. It is the springboard that illuminated her practice as an artist.

image-event is a new collaboration formed by Anastasia Xirouchakis and Tanoa Sasraku. This exhibition of the same name presents work by the artist's individual practices alongside a new body of work made together this year on the Isle of Skye. Giant skincare masks are situated in the barren Scottish landscape. They feel like timeless relics, appearing fleetingly, like a lunar eclipse. These brittle sculptures dragged through the wind, rain and snagged on rocks, increasingly resemble the Mycenaean masks that were excavated in the 1870s. However, rather than gold, these masks are made from cheap kitchen foil masquerading as some kind of precious metal. Here we are brought back to the present, where the human face is now a commodity and the skincare mask is essential.