Two degrees of Separation…
It’s taken me a while to get my head round Partition Parables at Derby’s Artcore venues. My usual practice is to get in, take a good look around and respond by either writing immediately or not at all (taking the view nowadays that if I don’t enjoy then best say nowt). One reason was simple embarrassment, somehow though only ten miles away it was my first visit to this excellent addition to the stock of venues within my remit for this blog. The gallery in particular is a beautiful space and the programme, not only exhibitions but a range of workshops and other events most enterprising. I’d urge everyone to get along there and take in the offer (that includes a good cafe too).
But back to the work in the show. Inspired by the 75th anniversary of partition (Pakistan & India initially, Pakistan & Bangladesh later) the two artists Tarla Patel and Rachel Magdeburg (recipients of residencies set up by the organisation) have made bodies of new work that ostensibly ‘respond’ to the idea of partition as a more generic topic (the introduction ties in both the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Brexit to this thesis?!). It also refers to the “relationship between humans and plants”. No doubt all these things might crowd in on the artist’s (and audience’s) minds as they explored the residency/exhibition opportunity but there is a point at which the specificity of what is produced meets the generalities of these wildly diverse themes. This is all the more acute when the artists (from Coventry & Wolverhampton) responses to the organisation, its locations and personalities and the wider Derby publics are pulled into the mix.
It all makes for textual narratives that confuse and obfuscate as much as they explain. But does that matter? After all, the work on show is what it is and whilst some elements of the handouts are replicated in the spaces themselves it should, and it does, stand on its own. Tarla Patel’s Seeds To Home is the easier of the two to grasp. Though the introduction of the generic AI platform DALL-E (now more widely shared as Craiyon) throws a somewhat confusing spanner into the works (not entirely explained away by suggestion that these apps correspond to memory loss in advancing years!).
I’d recently come from a viewing of Sutapa Biswas’s marvellous Lumen and so was attuned to a narrative of our dubious and complex colonial past. The video element of Patel’s installation held up pretty well against such stiff competition, not least in its more personal reflections on how culinary traditions can be both displaced and nourished through migrations. The use of the photographic elements against the sound components was particularly well thought through and utilised the semi-rotunda space to create both a general low-level hubbub and the use of bluetooth mini speakers to allow one to dip in and out of the visual and aural experiences. All this added up to an enjoyable and rewarding mix.
If the texts to Patel’s work were unnecessary then they might entirely disorientate in the context of Rachel Magdeburg’s paintings. Given that the paintings are dubbed ‘Cryptic’ in the title of the work Under The Walnut Tree: Cryptic Painting perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, maybe there’s a humour here gently taking a rise out of those of us who take the trouble to read the texts. A particularly amusing fragment suggests the artist has “taken an explorative intuitive and snowballing approach” to ideas that take a “cue from the partition in capitalist consumerist society between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ which is arguably culpable for the exploitation of the natural world as it is deemed separate from humans”. This is mixed into a postulated symbiosis twixt “illusionistic painting” and “zoological taxonomies of camouflage, aposematism and mimicry”. Again this potential Pseuds Corner entry wouldn’t matter if the paintings, actually rather intriguing and elegant, didn’t stand in direct contradiction to this (my guess is doctoral thesis) claptrap. They employ a fetching battery of methods and processes that bleed out the ‘facture’ and give the simple formal characteristics a kind of illustrative ambience – almost a Ladybird children book look. Magdeburg is clearly an interesting and arresting artist and a writer too, her milvus milvus: the reCAPTCHA script is a wonderful surreal piece that my old friends at Little Toller books wisely invited into their The Clearing blog. Her riffing on the re-introduction of the Red Kite (oft seen in our neck of the woods nowadays) is terrific. Here’s hoping that the PhD behind her, the poetry (in both her paintings and writings) come to the fore…she will be all the more compelling if it does.