URIEL ORLOW
The Short and The Long of It
(2.0)
2 October - 13 November 2010
While the focus of "The Short and The
Long of It " is a real event, Uriel
Orlow is more intent on permitting us glimpses than
revealing the whole picture. Spilling evocative images and
letting out the narrative like yards of rope, Orlow in turn
leads and obscures our reading of carefully edited artefacts,
images and texts, so that the momentum of our own curiosity
dictates the extent of our fragmentary understanding.
The installation relates to an incident
that unfolded during the outbreak of the ‘Six Day War’, or the
‘June War’ in 1967. The conflict between Israel, Egypt, Jordan
and Syria re-inscribed the US/USSR divide of the concurrent
Cold War, as well as the ongoing Arab–Israeli confrontation.
In short, as a result of heavy artillery fire and sunken
trawlers at either end of the Suez Canal, 14 cargo ships of
various nationalities were stranded for eight years in the
Great Bitter Lake, a large body of water at the canal’s
midpoint where ships pass one another before re-entering the
one-way traffic.
Trapped in the eye of a political and
military storm, this rum collection of commercial seafarers
formed the Great Bitter Lake Association (GBLA), a
pan-national alliance whose main aim was, firstly, to survive;
secondly, to create a functioning society between ships; and
thirdly, to fill the days, months and years ahead. The GBLA
mirrored the evolution of civilisation in microcosm, quickly
developing from a programme of contingent survival to one that
incorporated robust infrastructures of communication, formally
organised leisure pursuits and casual frivolity. Specially
designed postal stamps effectively declared the lake as a
territory to be factored into global geographies, while
onboard Olympic Games converted what Noam Chomsky has referred
to as the ‘irrational jingoism’ of the official Olympics to a
pan-national gesture of resilient, playful solidarity.
The GBLA might consequently be thought of
as a utopian society where antagonisms between nations,
creeds, classes and so on have been eradicated; the itinerant
essence of a ship, and the globalism it embodies, setting it
apart from the territorializing war of attrition that raged
around it. On the other hand, the reality may be less
idealistic, with the hard-boiled commercial shippers’
insistence that crew remain to safeguard vessels and cargo
marking an imperative that simply pitches all hands against
looters instead of one another.
Orlow does not indicate which
interpretation he favours. He is careful to encourage broad
historical, formal or theoretical inferences over specific
politics. A video interleaving vintage photographs and Super8
film shot by crewmembers with the artist’s own recent footage
on location is paired with a series of text slides that names
moments of particular relevance, general importance or
personal interest from the eight years of the ships’
confinement. This three-way comparison of timeframes and
events creates a complication of concurrence, consequence and
dissociation, giving rise to a sense that time is pleated,
causality radiating and that this rippling expanse of
saltwater somehow communicates diagonally through time.
The accompanying selection of found
material sets up a similar dynamic field of information, where
historical representation is ribboned through with facts,
associations, symbolism and poetics. Images of a glut of
apples rotting in their boxes, for instance, becomes an
exemplar of the flow of capital abruptly halted by the canal’s
closure; a snapshot of men in drag hints at the socio-sexual
impact of confinement; Orlow’s drawings of fish that continue
to migrate from the Red Sea to the warmer Mediterranean waters
express admiration for the ingenuity of nature and its own
temporality, while a sober image of photographic slide boxes
remind us of the persuasive archival processes at work here.
But, whereas nostalgia articulates the weighty pain of
partition from a personal past, Orlow’s open-handed
presentation permits us to retrieve from the shadowy margins a
history that is buoyant with the potential of the
indeterminate.
Orlow has exhibited widely including solo
projects at Laure Genillard, London (2010), Les Complices*,
Zurich (2009), Habres & partner, Vienna (2009), Jewish
Museum New York (2008-9), Blancpain Art Contemporain Geneva
(2008-9) and Argos Brussels (2008). Group exhibitions in 2010
include Hydrarchy, Gasworks, London, Over the Counter,
Kunsthalle Budapest, Yesterday Will Be Better, Aargauer
Kunsthaus, The Revenge of the Archive, Center for Photography,
Geneva, Us, South African National Gallery, Cape Town,
Paradise is Somewhere Else, Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt
and Jerwood Drawing Prize, UK touring exhibition. His work has
also been shown at Tate Modern London, Third Guangzhou
Triennial at Guangdong Museum of Art China, Kunstmuseum Bonn,
ICA London, Whitechapel Gallery London, Shedhalle Zürich, the
International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Locarno Film
Festival, Visions du Réel, Nyon and the Biennale of the Moving
Image, Geneva. Orlow has published several artist’s books and
has written for a number of publications.
Image:
Uriel Orlow
Limbo, 2010
HD video with sound, 13’
Courtesy of Campagne Première, Berlin
Campagne Première
Chausseestrasse 116
D-10115 Berlin
T +49 30 400 54 300
