January 15, 2013
On Vanishing Land
Mark Fisher and Justin Barton: On Vanishing Land
6 February–30 March 2013
Opening Hours: Wednesday–Saturday, 12–6pm
Press Breakfast with the artists: Tuesday 5 February, 9.30–11am
Preview: Tuesday 5 February, 6.30–8.30pm
Performances by John Foxx and Raime: Thursday 7 March, 7pm
(see www.theshowroom.org for information and booking)
Discussion with Mark Fisher, Justin Barton, The Otolith Collective,
John Foxx, Frances Morgan, Elizabeth Walling (Gazelle Twin):
Saturday 16 March, 3pm (free, no booking required)
The Otolith Collective and The Showroom present On Vanishing Land
a new work by British sound artists and theorists Mark Fisher and
Justin Barton.
On Vanishing Land (2013, 45m) is a magisterial audio-essay that evokes a walk undertaken by the artists along the Suffolk coastline in 2005, from Felixstowe container port to the Anglo-Saxon burial ground at Sutton Hoo.
Fisher and Barton have conjured a new form of sonic fiction from the dreamings, gleamings and prefigurations that pervade the Suffolk coast. The work includes commissions from digital musicians, interviews and the reflections of the artists. Inspired by the cumulative force of the Eerie that animates this landscape, On Vanishing Land pursues affinities between the modernist reinvention of the ghost story in M.R. James’ Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad (1904) and the atmospheric engineering of Brian Eno’s album On Land (1982). “Themes of incursion - by unnameable forces, geological sentience or temporal anomaly - recur throughout.” (Kodwo Eshun, The Otolith Collective, Curator, On Vanishing Land)
On Vanishing Land integrates new compositions by digital musicians Baron Mordant, Dolly Dolly, Ekoplekz, Farmers of Vega, Gazelle Twin, John Foxx, Pete Wiseman, Raime and Skjolbrot. For the installation at The Showroom it will be accompanied by an untitled sequence of a wide range of visual references, produced in collaboration with artist Andy Sharp (English Heretic).
Events accompanying the exhibition include a performance on 7 March by John Foxx and Raime of compositions from the project. On 16 March, Fisher and Barton, with The Otolith Collective, John Foxx, Frances Morgan (Deputy Editor, The Wire) and Elizabeth Walling (Gazelle Twin), will explore the contemporary cultural fascination with the illogics of the Eerie. Finally, a conversation at the Boathouse café on the River Deben, Suffolk between the artists and Andy Sharp (English Heretic) will discuss the reimagining of MR James’ ghost stories by television directors Jonathan Miller and Lawrence Gordon Clark since the late 1960s.
On Vanishing Land was jointly commissioned, produced and curated by The Otolith Collective and The Showroom.
