{"id":1908,"date":"2018-08-10T12:59:00","date_gmt":"2018-08-10T12:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/works.raqsmediacollective.net\/?p=1908"},"modified":"2025-01-15T11:04:22","modified_gmt":"2025-01-15T11:04:22","slug":"not-yet-at-ease","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/works.raqsmediacollective.net\/index.php\/2018\/08\/10\/not-yet-at-ease\/1908","title":{"rendered":"Not Yet At Ease"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Not Yet At Ease<\/strong><\/em>
<\/em><\/strong>Solo Exhibition <\/strong><\/em>
FirstSite, Colchester, United Kingdom (2018)<\/a> | ‘Spinal’, Frith Street Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2019)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Not Yet At Ease <\/em>marks the centenary of the First World War by speculating that – in some crucial ways – the First World War never ended. In many territories that were once battlefields of the First World War, especially in Eastern Europe and in West Asia, the world still stands just as uneasy and volatile. The ghosts of dead empires and the shadows of their armies have not yet left the battlefield. There is a lingering unease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 Not Yet At Ease<\/em> premiered at FirstSite, Colchester as part of the 1914-18 Now Commissions: a series of new artistic works commemorating a century of the First World War.

The work builds a labyrinth evoking the maze of the trenches, but with materials that echo the padded walls of hospital cells where \u2018shell shocked\u2019, sick, and injured soldiers were confined while undergoing treatment. Within this labyrinth films, voices, images, poetry, officialese and reportage jostle for attention. Not Yet At Ease<\/em> mines archival resources and invents a dreamscape to build a lyrical and imaginative layer of reflection. It discovers and highlights the official discomfiture with the \u201cexcess of poetry\u201d that the soldiers were writing home as a sign of \u2018mental disquietude\u2019). This is an early admission, which is also, simultaneously, an evasion, of the psychological distress produced by war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Nerves<\/a><\/strong><\/em> <\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mural, Text and Drawings transferred in Vinyl <\/em>
140 meter long curving wall<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The bold blue colour that forms the ground of Nerves is inspired by the Hospital Blues uniform worn by convalescing soldiers in British military hospitals in the early twentieth century. This intense colour field is overlaid with drawings of nerves and nerve endings as they were understood in 1916. The text fragments are phrases and expressions that use the word \u201cnerve\u201d, though the word itself is removed. English has many aphorisms around nerves: \u201ca bag of nerves\u201d, a \u201cbattle of nerves”, “a war of nerves”, “nerves of steel\u201d\u2026  This gesture creates an abstract, almost code-like pattern that viewers can decipher, and acts as an analogue for the frayed consciousnesses produced by shell-shock on the battlefield.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Spinal<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Video
Duration, 10′ 24″<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spinal<\/em> is a study of the vertebral column that brings together an anatomical model and a dancer\u2019s body in a conversation of gestures, stances, steps, positions, and caresses. The positions traced by the dancer\u2019s body echo the arrangement in John Singer Sargent\u2019s iconic 1912 painting \u201cGassed”, where a line of wounded soldiers, blinded by a nerve gas attack, hold on to each other, shuffling towards an uncertain goal. Hovering, too, is an image of the dancer\u2019s hands caressing a pedagogical model of the human back-bone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This exchange references the silences and elisions to avoid the term \u2018shell shock\u2019 (which has evolved to become PTSD today) by British Military Authorities. The \u201cnervous ailment\u201d – which authorities claimed was only experienced by officers and not British soldiers, or soldiers imported from other parts of Empire – was said to be linked to \u2018disturbances in the spinal column’ caused by repeated vibrations from gunfire and bomb explosions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spinal <\/em>attends to early twentieth century\u2019s dislocations as a move towards understanding human fragility and endurance. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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