|
Indepth Arts News:
"EXODUS: between promise and fulfilment"
2003-06-22 until 2003-08-03
Kettle's Yard Gallery, University of Cambridge
Cambridge, ,
UK United Kingdom
In 1869 a small survey team of Royal Engineers led by Captain Wilson and
Captain Palmer and including the photographer Sgt. James McDonald, began a
five month expedition into the Sinai desert - the region where Moses and
his followers wandered for forty years in search of the Promised Land.
Their goal, under the auspices of the military, was to produce accurate
maps and survey photographs of the region. In particular: "that there is a
great need to carry out such a survey must be manifest to all students of
Old Testament history; among the most important and interesting questions
which are subjects of inquiry are the locations of the Passage of the Red
Sea, the Route and Encampments of the Israelites, and the identification of
the Mountain of the Law-Giving."
Photographs from the Ordnance Survey of the Peninsula of Sinai 1869 by Sgt.
James McDonald (1822-1885)
David Austen
Vija Celmins
Ian Davenport
Helmut Federle
Callum Innes
John McCracken
John Zurier
Sgt.McDonald returned with over a hundred albumen print plates. They record
the purported sites of the Burning Bush and Ten Commandments and include
images of the large tablets or stele’s with Egyptian inscriptions that lay
strewn across the area and several panoramas showing the vertiginous scale
and bleakness of the barren desert landscape. Despite their historical,
factual function, Sgt McDonald’s photographs are full of paradoxes: they
represent a land of ‘recorded visions’, a space where heaven and earth meet
and the dynamic that exists between the immediate and the remote -the
promise and its fulfilment- is brought to bear on the field of
representation. ‘Exodus’ will include thirty of these photographs and the
work of seven contemporary artists.
The artists included here are not, however, necessarily acknowledging Sgt.
McDonald’s work; nor, giving their widely divergent working practices, were
they expected to. They were chosen because of certain shared affinities with
these photographs: an interest, for example, in the tension between the
abstractions of space and the specifities of place; the physical act of
delineating boundries - whether pictorial or literal; and, crucially, the
manner in which they reconceptualise Sgt. McDonald’s depictions of a
fluctuating site of representation and the space between the promise of
representation and its fulfilment. IMAGE:
Sgt. James McDonald
Camp in Wadi Ed Deir, 1868
Related Links:
| | 
|
