Folk seemed to like the photos and if all goes to plan over the next year, this will hopefully be just the beginning of a longer term collaborative project with the community.  Watch this space…

Diego Ventura

I never thought I’d attend a Corrida de Toros (bullfight) as I’ve never had much of a stomach for violence and don’t by any means support animal cruelty but… a good friend, Emilio Mendez who founded Suerte Matador, talks so passionately about the toros, I decided that, for better or worse, it was something I wanted to experience first hand.

It feels deeply problematic to say that I enjoyed it, the bloodshed was so graphic it almost felt hyperreal, but I couldn’t help but be swept up in the details of the ritual, the balletic elegance of the Toreros and the incredible horsemanship of the Rejoneadores.  The horses were my highlight, they are truly stunning and reminded me of the wonderful Kamcia, Pedro Infante‘s horse in No Desearas La Mujer de tu Hijo, a classic from the Epoca de Oro de Cine Mexicano. (see the video clip below)

I can’t defend the inherent cruelty but the crowd’s very vocal dissaproval of the clumsy final killing of a bull by one of the Torero’s did at least persuade me that they weren’t there to watch this spectacle in a gratuitous, sadistic capacity.

If Catalunya is leading the way for the rest of the world, then there’s a good chance the Corrida de Toros may well soon be a thing of the past.

Joselito Adame

Photography credit:  Hardey Martínez

Kamcia struts her stuff in No Desearas La Mujer de tu Hijo (1950, México)

Participating Artists: Daniel Alcalá, Ander Azpiri, Pablo Castillo, Verónica Cuervo, Alex Dorfsman, María García-Ibañez, Máximo González, Aramando Miguelez, Fernanda Sánchez-Paredes, Héctor Velázquez & Katri Walker

Opening: Thursday 24th November, 7:30pm
25th November 2011 – 20th January 2012

Avenida Veracruz 40
Colonia Roma Norte
Mexico City

Doña Julia with her ofrenda

A few days ago I made a wee trip back to the village in the Estado de México where I filmed Aguamiel to take some pictures and video of their Día de los Muertos celebrations with my friend Miriam, a Biologist and Environmental Anthropologist who’s been working with the community for a few years.  The village has now split into two, San Juan Atzingo and Teocalcingo and we spent the day in the latter which was a wonderful and moving experience.  The prayers and altar offerings were led by the elder folk in Tlahuica which is the indigenous language of the area and one that they’re making concerted efforts to preserve.  After the main ceremony in the delegación, we made a mini tour of the village and were warmly welcomed into so many homes and offered a ‘conejo’ in each one – a bowlful of food from the altar, alongside freshly made tortillas and the most amazing mushroom tomato chile soup I’ve ever had in my whole life   Here’s a small selection of some of my photos from the day…

Doña Lina offering prayers for los muertos

pan dulce

trail of petals to show the dead the way to the altar

my 'conejo'

a moment of thanks for the ceremony

Doña Julia's kitchen, the source of the bestest mushroom tomato chile soup in the world

My great pal Paulina del Paso‘s first feature length documentary La Guerrera was in competition at the Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia so I went along to cheer for her…   It’s a fantastic film, so sensitively and devotedly filmed over four years during Ana María Torres aka “La Guerrera’s” journey towards the World Championship Female Boxing title.  Ana is a mesmerising blend of femininity and sweetness alongside sheer hardheadedness and aggression and I think Paulina’s done an absolutely magical job of bringing that to the audience.  Here’s a trailer for the film and an interview with Paulina…

From the weird vantage of a bastion of privilege a guided tour of art for all leaves unsettling questions about public and private creativity.

Often, and this is the principle of Doors Open Day, you’re meant to feel a flush of excitement and gratitude when the front door of a building that you can’t usually enter, through external rules or just plain intenral fear, suddenly creaks open for you.

Visiting Fettes College during the Edinburgh Art Festival last week, rather than these emotions I was taken aback to discover that my main feeling was one of overwhelming sadness.

Fettes is a Disneyfied tower with such green, spacious grounds and lofty views that it feels as though the city that surrounds it is not a real place but some Marie Antoinette fantasy conjured up to keep its pupils mildly entertained. The school is, of course, famous for educating Tony Blair.

But climbing its stone stairs I didn’t feel like I’d conquered the citadel, couldn’t feel self-righteously angry, just weirdly heartbroken. It wasn’t that the place was so extraordinarily different from the perfectly pleasant classrooms that I and my children have encountered throughout our lives; more that it was so close, so recognisable, yet somehow so implacably distant.

I was in Fettes for The Indirect Exchange Of Uncertain Value, a symposium and an exhibition by the artists Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan for the Collective Gallery. You can’t simply roll up to see the show. You must book a guided tour of the normally inacessible buildings, and therein lies the beginnings of a complex meditation on the nature of public and private, inside and out, institutionalised space, choice and meaning.

The symposium was expertly constructed like one of those compartmentalised jewellery boxes: an opening out of big ideas and small gems. From a poetry reading by Tom Leonard, staking out a sense of freedom on the page and in the mind, to architecture writer Owen Hatherley’s blistering attack on Blair-era housing policy, fantastically reminiscent of a 1970s polytechnic lecturer still unafraid to use the words “social housing” out loud.

But the creative thrust was not for some tub-thumping call for “access” or simple answers about the complex notions of art. The show itself is admirably terse, from the giant Trojan kitten that contains a Chris Evans sculpture you might never see, to a boot-shaped sculpture that turns out to be a soundproofed cinema. Inside is Elizabeth Price‘s new film Choir if you hurry you can catch her work in Glasgow too at the British Art Show).

Price is an artist on a roll at the moment, and Choir is an absolutely riveting ten minutes. It brings together archival images and texts: detailed exploration of medieval church architecture with a cleverly constructed soundtrack, a gospel and soul mash-up, in a way that might seem incongruous but isn’t. A choir is both an actual place in a church as well as a word for collective voices.

The film is an examination of score and voice, call and response, anda metaphor for the way we construct all kinds of instituions in our streets, on our computers and in our heads. But if that sounds boring, Choir is emphatically not. Price is a brilliant, authoritative orchestrator of complex elements: when the screening room resounds with a hand-clap-like thunder, you find yourself snapping to attention.

When talking about her work, Price is eloquent on a complicated point: in the digital world, any amount of editing doesn’t get rid of or even rearrange the source material she uses, her research simply sqauts in her computer’s cache. In other words, these days there is no cutting room floor – stuff you gather up never really disappears, and can be made and remade at will.

It’s a point that has resonance for another Collective show that deals with archives: the Viennese artist Hans Schabus‘s Remains Of The Day. At the streetfront galery he has assembled all the waste that he and his family have produced in a year, cleaned it, categorised it and marshalled it into an undulating sculpture that snakes through the gallery and is best viewed, at first, from the street. It’s a one-liner, this show, but none the worse for it.

This is not the aesthetics of dirt – the material has been cleaned in processes that seem to have made even nappies and sanitary towels pristine – nor is it overtly a hectoring message on recycling or waste. It seems close to a family portrait: what goes in, what comes out, what is left. You imagine a family communing round the table, the passage of time and the turn of the year.

You are mildly shocked by how much there is, and then you realise there is actually not that much at all and are impressed by how ordered it all seems. There is the withered Christmas tree, the broken coffee maker. But largely it is ranks and ranks of fruit juice Tetra Paks cleaned and folded neatly, jars of pickles and a surprising number of empty tins of butter beans. other than a clear addiction to diet cola, his family diet seems pretty healthy.

David Mach‘s Precious Light at the City Art Centre is the very definition of excessive, from the massive wire crucifixion sculpture Golgotha, to the collaged crowd scenes: it’s clearly a Cecil B DeMille version of the Bible, never using one extra when a thousand will do, and like Blake’s Jerusalem it imagines biblical narratives on home turf. It is an enormous undertaking, but Mahs’s own position on belief is unclear and his ability to touch the heart seems eroded. The King James Version of the Bible, which the exhibition marks, was a landmark in the Ebglish language. perhaps all mach is saying is that it has since presented us with hundreds of stories, rather than “the greatest story ever told.”

Belief of sorts is also the theme at the Ingleby Gallery, where Mystics Or Rationalists is a potted history of recent conceptual art strategies, touching on both the dry and rigorous and the possibly divine, and a very persistent interaction between the two. These are works concerned with the history of art and ideas, by artists who sue beauty and concision as well as brains.

This is an elegant show, with a lovely mix between more senior figures and a new generation. There is Simon Starling‘s circular 2006 work, Autoxylopyrocycloboros, commissioned by Cove Park, in which a small wooden steamer is sawn up and the wood fed into its own boiler; the artist finally falling into the chilly waters of Loch Long. The artist Katie Paterson‘s work with the light bulb manufacturer Osram to manufacture a moonlight bulb and her attempts to measure out an average adult life through the lifes[an of these bilbs signal a bright young talent.

Susan Hiller‘s internet-culled images of levitating figures at the Ingleby tap into the internet’s ability to develop and nourish subcultures. there has long been a fashion for art that examines such subcultures: the kind of immersive work that appears to show a culture viewed from within, or the kind of cool sociological eye that can be very entertaining for the audience and rather brutal towards its subject. Katri Walker‘s show North West for Peacock Visual Arts, in The Old Ambulance Depot, falls between the two.

The Making of Three Guns for a Kllling is the story of a group of pals in Aberdeenshire making a cowboy movie in the back garden that one fo them has turned into a movie set settlement named Tranquility. The saloon and the sheriff’s office are barely disguised garden sheds. Boot Hill Cemetery is created from bits of old crate and street signs.

Walker’s very beautiful film North West shows the near lunar landscape of Assynt, with the mountains of Quinag and Suilven rising from the deforested desert. The conceit is that it re-imagines rural Scotland, not so much as an untouched Wild West wilderness, but the moral landscape of John Ford, a place of action and consequence.

Perhaps, on reflection, that may also be a clue to undertsanding the impact of the beautiful, insulated world of Fettes College.

People and place cannot be anything other than intimately linked. Places are shaped and brought to life through their inhabitants as much as people are moulded and personified by the landscapes they exist within.

The work of Scottish-born artist Katri Walker strives to reveal the nuances of this complex relationship between individual and place. Through an interwoven practice consisting of part documentary and part conceptual modes of presentation – primarily film and photographic image, Walker lays out the intimacies that she perceives in the everyday.

This sense of location and geography is revealed most in her 2011 work, ‘North West‘. Taking its leave from the familiar cinematic language of Hollywood Westerns, the 3-channel video piece locates the viewer in a selection of pivotal landscapes. Positioned at high vantage points in the island mountains of Assynt, Sutherland, the viewer is subject to a landscape stretching before them across a triad of images. Still camera shots remind the viewer of the stillness and timelessness of such scapes, but also the sense of place and cultural representation that the Assynt landscape (akin to America’s Monument Valley) means to the those whose homeland it forms a part of.

In another of her works about place ‘The City is the Film‘ (2010) Walker presents the city as muse, revealing through camera the characters on its stage. The film collages an intimate portrait of Glasgow and its inhabitants, using the Edwin Morgan poem ‘A City’ as the verbal thread linking the human and architectural cast together. The minimal soundtrack to the film aids reflection as the frame continually pauses to consider the city’s sights and its inhabitants.

In the photographic work ‘Pipe Major Wyatt Earp‘ (2011) Walker presents a documentary image of Pipe Major Iain Grant. The dual identity of the subject and his specific interests is exposed through the contrasting mix of body adornments: a tattoo of the frontier Marshal Wyatt Earp, a set of bagpipes, the stars and stripes on an American dog-tag and finally a kilt. The reference points could not be further from each other but together provide an interesting mix of contemporary Scottish and historic American. Shot against a black background the subject is forced to the fore, with no contextualising background or any other information to draw attention away from the solid stare of the Pipe Major. The work alludes to the previously discussed North West film and its reference to the historic relationship between Scotland and the USA.

There is a real sense that in all of Walker’s works she herself is present in the language of the piece, an acknowledgement of the intimacy that exists between herself and her country is apparent. Through this subtle emotion she carefully extracts and reveals her characters, be they architectural, human or geographic.

Karen Gaskill is an independent curator and researcher based in London, UK. Recent exhibitions include Constellations at Cornerhouse Gallery, Manchester, co-curated with Michelle Kasprzak, the co-curation of the FutureEverything, Manchester 2010 arts programme, and Save Us, Macclesfield, July 2010. Karen is currently Guest Curator at Somerset Art Works for a year, managing three new contemporary art commissions and also is a Senior Lecturer in Photography and Moving Image at Sheffield Hallam University.

Karen Gaskill on Axis

Occasionally Somewhere

Read original text on Axis

In the 18th and 19th centuries Scots emigrated to the USA. Their culture and music were elements in the cross-pollination which spawned the historical and cinematic Wild West. In the 20th century this returned, through films and music, and begat Scottish cowboys and the Country & Western music scene. North West explores this relationship. Here the hills of Assynt stand in, spectacularly, for John Ford’s Western landscapes. The good old boys of Tranquillity, Aberdeenshire live out their alter egos as gunslingers; and Pipe Major Iain Grant, aka Wyatt Earp, in kilt, moustache and tattoos, challenges our notions of reality.

Featuring a collaborative audiovisual installation with Wounded Knee.

Dates: 9th August – 4th September 2011
Preview: Saturday 6th August 3-6pm
Opening times: Tues – Sun 12-6pm

The Old Ambulance Depot
77 Brunswick Street
Edinburgh EH7 5HS