Contact Editions

Judges respond: Edmund Clark

June 3, 2013 – 10:00 am By emilygraham

We’re honoured to have Edmund Clark on our judging panel for the Night Contact New Work grants. Clark uses photography, found imagery and text to explore links between representation and politics. He is best known for his work exploring the consequences of control and incarceration in the monographs Guantanamo: If the Light Goes Out (2010) and Still Life Killing Time (2007). Clark employs mixed media and technology in his exhibition installations to explore the viewer’s experience of and relationship to the work.

We took this opportunity to ask him a few questions.

Camps: Exercise Cage, Camp Delta from the book/series ‘Guantanamo: If the light goes out’ by Edmund Clark

What would you like to see from the New Work grant applications?

I want to see ideas for work that challenge me. This can be intellectually or formally. I don’t want to see proposals for slideshows set to music, which is how a lot of photographers seem to interpret multimedia. I am looking for ideas that explore the possibilities of mixing media so that the whole becomes something different to the parts; where it is apparent that the collaboration of practitioners, or the mix of the media, will lead to work that takes me somewhere new or makes me reappraise an existing idea or experience.

My own collaborations help me see new facets to the ideas I am developing. This is what happened with my film ‘Section 4 Part 20: One Day on a Saturday’, which looks at ideas of degradation, control and complicity in relation to Guantanamo. Working with a multimedia editor added a degree of complexity to the viewer’s experience, in a way I could not have predicted. It showed me how mixing media can add depth to and develop ideas. This is something I already try to do by playing with narrative and form in books, but mixed media is exciting for me because I can see how I can make the complexity of my work experiential and 3D; if that makes sense! I’m trying to do that with a new installation piece re-contextualising ideas of sacrifice and honour in war.

Inspiration piece: tell us about a piece of work that exemplifies for you what is interesting, challenging or exciting about working with mixed media / the projection format / in a collaborative manner.

I can think of two pieces and artists. I find Gillian Wearing’s work very interesting for the way she mixes performance and reality, and particularly how she explores time. And that she has used both film and photography in her work. I was enthralled by her film ’60 Minutes of Silence’ which looks like a group photograph of 26 policemen and policewomen but is a 60 minute video. The volunteer constabulary gradually start to shuffle and twitch to varying degrees. The viewer has a similar experience standing or seated before the giant screen for an hour – or not. I found it a very clever, funny and profound piece of work. It was an hour-long group art performance experience reflecting on ideas of control, truth and art. Simple but transformative.

Installation shot of Gillian Wearing’s 60 Minutes of Silence

I met Omer Fast when we both showed at the Brighton Biennial. I came across a reworking of his installation film ‘The Casting’ on Vimeo (‘The Casting’ (Front)). The piece mixes the narrative of a soldier talking about an experience with a girl in Germany with his war experience in Iraq. The intertwined narratives are played out on storyboard style tableaux (which resemble photographs) and through film. To me, it ravels together notions of powerlessness, memory and misunderstanding in a very effective way.

Omer Fast’s The Casting (Front)