The Donkey Field & Hidden in Plain Sight

Solo show with 1 single screen film installation, 13 photographs and 1 monitor work

The central feature of the exhibition will be a single screen film titled The Donkey Field. The artist’s new film weaves a link between an antisemitic attack in 1944 on a young boy on a piece of common land known locally as ‘the donkey field’ and the story of the persecution of Marie and Balthazar in the acclaimed film Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966). The film features a text, based on sections of a memoir of Budapest in the last year of World War II, and scenes which re-enact and reframe Bresson’s allegorical story about the scapegoating of innocent subjects. Partly shot on the streets of present-day Budapest, under a regime criticized for its anti-immigrant policies and harsh treatment of refugees, The Donkey Field underlines the relevance of the boy’s story to other, more recent stories of displacement and victimization.

The exhibition also includes several new photographic works that depict landscapes whose pastoral qualities become shadowed by their association with dark episodes of European history.
The Donkey Field featured in solo presentations at the Imperial War Museum & Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London and will go on to show at BALTIC, CAST & Merz Barn, Cumbria.

Alongside this the gallery will present In Plain Sight which looks to another of Bresson’s film Pickpocket (1959). For this work, originally commissioned by L’Été Photographique de Lectoure, the artist worked with models to re-enact sections from Bresson's film where the protagonists rehearse and perform the techniques that pickpockets use to avoid being caught. Accompanied by a spoken narrative written from the perspective of one of the protagonists, the work reflects on the intimacy and invasive quality of the act of theft.

The exhibition will also include a selection of photographs from The Overcoat, an artist’s bookwork published by Four Corners Press in London in which Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 darkly humorous novella of the same name is presented alongside large format photographs of contemporary shop vitrines. Shot mainly on location in London & Paris, the images reflect on the preoccupation with illusions of status and opulence that figures in Gogol’s text and on the streets of the city. In Plain Sight and The Overcoat were both conceived in the wake of the 2008 financial crash.

Támogatók | Supported by: Arts Council England, University of the Arts LondonKülön köszönet | With thanks to The Elephant Trust

• https://www.glassyard.hu/exhibitions/201...