A unity of time and place with other times and places
Ravi Agarwal, Ali Essafi, Cătălin Ilie, Rosalind Nashashibi, Margaret Tait, Tom Thayer
The exhibition A unity of time and place with other times and places takes a selection of films and poems by Margaret Tait as its departure point. Tait, the Scottish poet-filmmaker and filmmaker-poet, whose works never settled in categories but represented a species of their own, was born in 1918 in Kirkwall, UK, where she also died in 1999, aged 80. A contemporary of documentarist John Grierson and the Rose Street Poets in Edinburgh, Margaret Tait was only marginally or insufficiently credited by fellow filmmakers and writers during her life. In her films as well as in her poetry, Tait keenly focuses her attention on the prosaic, the available, and the everyday, precisely because of their 'insistence on existence,' and as 'a form of paying attention to the world,' as author So Mayer aptly remarks.
While in the majority of her films she crafted her own cinematographic language from a vocabulary of documentary 16mm footage, music, and spoken word, Tait also experimented with hand-painted animated film. The artists invited to contribute their works to this exhibition, Ravi Agarwal (*1958, India), Ali Essafi (*1963, Morocco), Cătălin Ilie (*1982, Romania), Rosalind Nashashibi (*1973, UK), and Tom Thayer (*1970, USA), reflect in their films or videos aspects that intersect in different ways with Tait’s artistic concerns. Whether through documentary footage, assemblages of found images, poetry, animated film, or music and sound, the presented works cast a keen look at the world. They remind us, much like the title of the exhibition borrowed from Margaret Tait’s poem Now to practice empathy with both that which we know as well as the Other.
//
Further reading / Research:
· Margaret Tait. Poems, Stories and Writings, edited by Sarah Neely, Carcanet Classics, 2023
· Subjects And Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader, Peter Todd (ed.), LUX, 2005
· John Berger, Why Look at Animals, in: About Looking, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009
· Ravi Agarwal, Have you seen the flowers on the river?
· Ali Essafi, Widen the Circle: An Obscure Experimentation in North African Avant-Garde Cinema, Sharjah Art Foundation, 2022
· Reconstituting Archives: Moroccan Cinema and History in Ahmed Bouanani and Ali Essafi's Projects of Re-collection, in: Expressions maghrébines, Volume 21, Numéro 2, hiver 2022, pp. 153–169
· Rosalind Nashashibi, Catalogue, Isla Leaver-Yap (ed.), ICA and Bergen Kunsthall, 2009
We would like to thank Jovan Atanackovic, the National Library of Scotland, LUX, David Lipps, and all participating artists.
