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MISTAH KURTZ - HE NOT DEAD: FIONA BANNER in collaboration with PAOLO PELLEGRIN and in association with the ARCHIVE OF MODERN CONFLICT
Fiona Banner's project for PEER has been in response to an invitation to collaborate with the London-based Archive of Modern Conflict. Rather than delving into the archive to draw out, spotlight or re-contextualise specific material for special scrutiny, Banner has elected to commission a new body of work by award winning Magnum photographer Paolo Pellegrin who she briefed to explore the City of London and to reflect its activities, behaviours, customs and costume through the lens of conflict photography. In a subversion of roles, Banner will then present a selection of these images to be accessioned into the archive, to be filed under the heading Heart of Darkness, 2014.
Banner has taken Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness (1899) as her starting point for a number of projects in recent years. At PEER she has created a rich and complex installation that combines drawing, photography, projection, sound and artefacts and continues her long-held fascination with Conrad's disturbing narrative into the moral and psychological depths of man's inhumanity to man. Conrad's story begins on the Thames with Marlow giving an account of his steamboat journey into the Congo on board the Roi de Belges. He was in pursuit of a renegade ivory trader, Mr Kurtz, whose management of his enslaved workers had seriously disintegrated. At the end of this doomed journey, the seemingly self-appointed demigod Kurtz has died and Marlow bears the scars of having witnessed both extreme savagery and the horrific effects of unsuppressed greed. The title of the exhibition is misappropriated from a key line in the text that reads, 'Mistah Kurtz - he dead.'
Fiona Banner's project for PEER has been in response to an invitation to collaborate with the London-based Archive of Modern Conflict. Rather than delving into the archive to draw out, spotlight or re-contextualise specific material for special scrutiny, Banner has elected to commission a new body of work by award winning Magnum photographer Paolo Pellegrin who she briefed to explore the City of London and to reflect its activities, behaviours, customs and costume through the lens of conflict photography. In a subversion of roles, Banner will then present a selection of these images to be accessioned into the archive, to be filed under the heading Heart of Darkness, 2014.
Banner has taken Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness (1899) as her starting point for a number of projects in recent years. At PEER she has created a rich and complex installation that combines drawing, photography, projection, sound and artefacts and continues her long-held fascination with Conrad's disturbing narrative into the moral and psychological depths of man's inhumanity to man. Conrad's story begins on the Thames with Marlow giving an account of his steamboat journey into the Congo on board the Roi de Belges. He was in pursuit of a renegade ivory trader, Mr Kurtz, whose management of his enslaved workers had seriously disintegrated. At the end of this doomed journey, the seemingly self-appointed demigod Kurtz has died and Marlow bears the scars of having witnessed both extreme savagery and the horrific effects of unsuppressed greed. The title of the exhibition is misappropriated from a key line in the text that reads, 'Mistah Kurtz - he dead.'