In a similar gesture, Douglas Gordon’s Under Darkness, Between Shadows (2000), hovered over the city. I first heard rumours of this work in the 1990s, and included it in Justified Sinners (co-edited with Ross Birrell, 2002), an anthology surveying the archaeology of Scottish counter-culture, of which Gordon’s darkness marked an endpoint. ‘Under Darkness, Between Shadows’ is a proposal to […]
Architectural ruins and dematerialised art objects share their sense of potential with the archaeological traces of dùn (fort), suidhe (seats), temples, cup-and-ring marked rocks and shieling. These dark relics have offered poets and artists mytho-poetic conspectus to conjure new-and-yet-older Scotlands. For instance, the landscape installations, performances and projections created by Angus Farquhar’s NVA are ambitious projects that riff off […]
Some books are lies frae end to end, And some great lies were never penn’d. – Robert Burns ‘Death and Doctor Hornbook: A True Story’, from Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Edinburgh edition, 1787. What is past is prologue. – Zadie Smith White Teeth, 2000 So it begins…the beginning of the end of Minus […]
Afterall Journal 45 Contents Foreword– Charles Esche Contextual Essays Thinking and Engaging with the Decolonial: A Conversation Between Walter D. Mignolo and Wanda Nanibush– Walter D. Mignolo & Wanda Nanibush The Art of Gentrification: The Lisbon Version– Ana Teixeira Pinto a year or more of darkness, a few hundred years without day– Alec Finlay Artists Britta Marakatt-Labba Britta […]