The Other Dark brought together pieces by Dean, Skaer / Nashashibi and Jeremy Millar that revisit or reach back to particular works from art history. The two pieces featured by Jeremy Millar reference German art historian Aby Warburg. The Man Who Looked Back (2010) is based on Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924-1929), a project described by Christopher D. Johnson as an ‘attempt to map the “afterlife of antiquity,” or how images of great symbolic, intellectual, and emotional power emerge in Western antiquity and then reappear and are reanimated in the art and cosmology of later times’. Millar’s panel ‘map’ of images, based on the format of Warburg’s Atlas, consists of representations of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice from throughout history. In this legend, Orpheus is allowed to reclaim Eurydice from the afterlife provided he does not look back at her, which he does with dire consequences. This citation problematizes the act of ‘looking back’ while granting ambiguous success to the Orphic journey of reclamation. In the context of this show, it could be read as saying that it is possible to approach objects and moments lost in the past, but it is the process of doing so and the distance covered that offer rewards. The original ‘look’ upon the work that inspired this process is impossible to replicate with the passage of time.

 
Rather than a direct ‘look back’ at any of the artworks they reference, the pieces in this exhibition did mainly approach them as beacons to navigate a journey through space (Dean) or time (Nashashibi / Skaer). Dean’s audio documentation of her search for the site of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, the narrative of a journey, even contains the suggestion that Smithson’s directions were simply a ruse to allow people to experience the beautiful landscape she passes through. Nashashibi / Skaer’s film Our Magnolia (2009) sees Paul Nash’s 1944 painting Flight of the Magnolia, created under the shadow of anticipated German invasion, through the filter of more recent contexts such as the Iraq War and Thatcherism. Yet it is filmed and projected on the increasingly rare medium of 16mm, which lends it a sense of operating outside of the contemporary moment, especially when it shows computer monitors shot on grainy celluloid in a reversal of the now usual sight of digitized celluloid images. Rather than speaking from one point in time or the other, this aesthetic decision allows the artists to gather and encompass multiple moments without quite belonging to any. Millar’s Melancholy Mobile (2017) sculptures translate a mysterious polyhedron that appears in an Albrecht Dürer engraving through Alexander Calder’s suspended shapes. The resulting forms reverse the ‘looking back’ found in the rest of the show to instead present an object that has travelled through art history and arrived with us reshaped by it along the way.

 
Now Wakes the Sea was to be found some miles inland from the Sirius, at a distance from the coast that turned out to be quite appropriate. This take on ‘contemporary art and the ocean’ borrowed its title from a J.G. Ballard story in which an ancient sea is now the site of a suburb. For one of its residents, however, this ocean returns every night and threatens to engulf the neighbourhood. This exhibition likewise addressed the sea as something distant and other, a haunting concept that readily acts as medium for ideas and sensations of submersion and salvage, as well as the seduction of oblivion.

 
Tacita Dean’s photographs concerning the disappearance of Donald Crowhurst effectively rely on the absence of the ocean for their power. Crowhurst was an amateur sailor who succumbed to insanity and suicide in 1969 while attempting to circumnavigate the world alone on a trimaran. Dean bookends this archetypal narrative with one archive shot of Crowhurst setting out on his voyage and two contemporary photographs of Berwick Lighthouse, as if still awaiting his safe arrival. Between these discreet documentary images, the ocean is a vast and chilling lacuna that has swallowed the man and his story whole. Andreas Kindler von Knobloch, by contrast, enacts the simple desire for sublime experience through photo-documenting his sailing excursions around Dublin Bay. These images resemble nothing so much as advertising for an outdoor pursuits line. He references another disappearance at sea, that of conceptual artist Bas Jan Adler, but does so as a sort of elusive experiential horizon to which his overbearingly emphasized presence can only provide an ironic counterpoint.

 
Marcel Dinahet approaches disappearance at sea from an arguably more poignant angle, although in this case the disappearance is of his art works in the ocean depths rather than of people. His two videos featured in the exhibition document sculptural pieces installed at the bottom of the sea. These stone objects have a deceptively functional appearance that makes them feel part of their marine surroundings in the way that old wreckage might, their texture blending well with the surrounding sands. The underwater camera in these looped videos repeatedly passes over the works, unable to find a fixed position in the current and thus giving the impression of an obsessively repeated final glance at objects that the artist can’t quite bring himself to definitively relinquish to the anonymity of the seabed. Sean Lynch’s photographs only seem to confirm Dinahet’s anxieties. The history behind his pictures of metal casts from a bankrupt Belfast DeLorean factory repurposed as anchors in Galway Bay is provided in print, but the testimony of his images is pure texture. The leveling power of the rusting seawater prevails and seems to erase any trace of prior histories.

 
Back on the water’s surface, an installation by Conrad Shawcross documents a rowing trip he took up the River Lea, a tributary of the Thames, with almost parodic literalness. Its centerpiece is a video emitting from a projector mounted in a boat. This rotates 360 degrees like an earnest little robot replicating the circular movement of Shawcross’ camcorder recording the journey in real time.

 
Lucy Skaer also presents us with a ‘boat’ but one that is still journeying. Her Good Ship Blank and Ballast (2010-2018) is part of an ongoing project based on Plato’s Ship of Fools that evolves as it moves from gallery to gallery. In this iteration, it is a small boat-shaped object with cloth sails, and concrete blocks around its base. The pattern in the sails is actually a reflection of the floor tile pattern featured in a previous installation of this project. Without that context, however, it immediately evokes a more general sense of the urban, domestic and manmade, as suggested by the materials she employs. Reshaped as a boat, these elements are set adrift by the sea as a subconscious image of instability. It was the first work that visitors encountered on entering the exhibition and perfectly encapsulated this uncanny Ballardian thematic that ran through the show. If drift underlies Skaer’s pieces, Maria McKinney’s troubling Abyssals (2014) are more suggestive of submergence. These are large net sculptures containing materials such as fruit and vegetables, false nails, expanding foam and concrete, as well as the artist’s breath. Large in scale and unsettlingly intimate in material, their shapes resemble organic undersea growths, as if supported and formed by water on all sides. Yet these cloying forms are composed of manmade detritus, combining edible, cosmetic, building and bodily elements in a way that suggests an oneiric and startling reconfiguring of discarded matter that is still invisibly clinging to us.

 
The seductive lure of the sea also flowed through the exhibition thanks to the presence of Janaina Tschäpe’s work. Not only were her paintings hung at intervals throughout the show, but the liltingly woozy Russian sailor’s song that accompanies her wonderful video He Drowned in Her Eyes as She Called Him to Follow (2000) also drifted across the whole gallery, a siren song drawing visitors towards this last piece in the show. It is a semi-narrative work that suggests mermaid legends as it follows the dazed wanderings of a woman apparently fished from the sea. Its infectious atmosphere of sea, sun and sensuousness effortlessly absorbs kitsch and nostalgia into a shimmering and fragile lo-fi visual texture which seems constantly on the point of dissolving everything in light and water. The joy of dissolving is, however, ultimately linked to loss and death. Tschäpe’s video is an appropriately celebratory summation of the ambivalent attraction of this watery oblivion that flowed throughout Now Wakes the Sea.

 
The Other Dark and Now Wakes the Sea approached their subjects obliquely, as reflections or echoes. The primary concerns relating to both the ocean and to art historical landmarks were presented not as isolated or discrete points of interest, but as having been fully absorbed by contemporary forms of artistic awareness, while remaining resonant within them. The way in which the vastness of the sea and the deep reservoir of art historical tradition haunt contemporary art and culture was subtly articulated by both of these exhibitions.

 
The Other Dark was on view 16 July – 26 August 2017. Now Wakes the Sea was on view 4 August – 5 November 2017.

 
The immediate thrill of 90 Years Without Sleep comes from seeing a work that does everything ‘wrong’ by any conventional standard, that charges at absurdity headfirst without the shield of irony and manages to break through to emerge as an oddly haunting and affecting work, in which the single-minded simplicity of the treatment perfectly gels with the extreme isolation it explores. An act of unswerving faith rather than smart calculation, it transports viewers into a private headspace where an innocently personal vision unfolds with the intense urgency of the last videotape on earth. A message in a bottle. But even this does not quite account for the film’s quirky power, or the complex questions it throws up about how we categorize moving images these days. I was very glad of the opportunity some six months later to revisit this seldom-screened work on its projection at The Guesthouse in Cork – to be in a position to better formulate the challenge it poses to certain long-standing preconceptions about the relationship between moving images and reality.

 
It is, first and foremost, a response to and appropriation of genre cinema (and, of course, TV). As such, it is a very personal distillation of an emotional essence extracted from mainstream cinema and released into the ‘real world’ – a world without budget, a ‘documentary’ world. Unlike tedious amateur replications of mainstream movies that pedantically follow its techniques, Gallardo establishes a very particular and extreme relationship with time and space. In place of the traditionally pareddown, narrative-driven apparatus of mainstream storytelling, he creates an echo chamber in which the bellow of horror at the centre of both his film and the Twilight Zone original can reverberate endlessly in a temporal stasis born of repetitiveness. Formally, such an experiment brings his work somewhat in line with traditions of modernist art cinema as typified by Antonioni, or certain tendencies in structuralist filmmaking. But Gallardo eschews any claim to the cultural respectability or artistic self-consciousness of these cinemas and opts not only for home video technology and aesthetics but slightly dated ones at that. The result of this strikingly spontaneous combination is perhaps, above all, a radically immersive documentary on urban space that couldn’t have emerged as compellingly if conceived as documentary per se.

 
The dream of universally available filming tools and of being able to pick up a camera as easily as a pen is a very old one. It was born at a time when the technical and economic exigencies of filmmaking were such that the production of moving images was all but entirely under the control of movie studios. Therefore, it was equally a dream of images that would be free and other from the standard conventions of traditional cinema. One that could throw light on reality or lead to new, poetic ways of seeing. Now that this dream has become reality, what seems to have resulted is the multiplication of conventions rather than their obsolescence. And, of course, moving images are in no way synonymous with ‘cinema’ any longer. Gallardo’s film is in ways a reminder of some important works that appeared at the moment when the democratisation of filmmaking began in earnest, and which presented radically disconcerting reflections, perhaps less of mainstream cinema, as of its pervasive cultural influence, while still acknowledging it as the central reference point. Films by Warhol or Jack Smith overturned cinematic perception in terms of temporality and representation at least partly through the no-holds-barred embrace of a fantasy of cinema that, by manifesting in a ‘real’ world that couldn’t have been more different from the calculated formulae of Hollywood, forced a groundup rethinking of cinema’s possibilities. By flinging himself with such flailing intensity upon his cinematic fantasy, Gallardo presents us with an exploration of the margins of a city rendered fantastically vivid and experiential by being filtered through the fictionalised sensibility of his protagonist. Paradoxically, it is hard to imagine any documentary strategy that could bring viewers so close to this reality. 90 Years Without Sleep therefore succeeds best as a fascinating by-product of a by-product of cinema that, by refusing to strive for respectable adherence to any acknowledged cinematic category, and by throwing itself open to charges of ineptitude from all sides, reveals as much about the power and potential of the moving image as anything made in recent years.

 
Juan Carlos Gallardo: 90 Years Without Sleep was screened 10 September 2015.

My first encounter with a Buharov film was at Thessaloniki Film Festival in 2008 in a major retrospective of films that emerged from Hungary’s Béla Balázs Studios (or ‘BBS’). Although it ceased production in the ‘90s, the BBS is an extraordinary phenomenon, unique in the history of East European cinema. Its official purpose was to act as a state-owned ‘workshop’ that functioned as a stepping-stone between film school and the industry. What it became was a self-regulating, government-funded experimental film studio, working with an unprecedented degree of freedom from Communist state censorship. Granted, the films made there were almost never shown, but they were made and the rich heritage of innovative work that emerged from it is truly remarkable.

The Buharovs’ short Hotel Tubu (2002) was the only post-BBS film included in these programmes, selected as an indication that its visionary spirit lives on. And the Buharovs are quick to acknowledge BBS films as a crucial influence and inspiration. Yet even in the context of watching hours of often highly impressive BBS work, Hotel Tubu kept insistently, repeatedly floating to the surface of my consciousness, the most haunting film of the festival by far. Its almost confrontationally unselfconscious use of faux naïf imagery presented with a peculiar lyricism and a mysteriously plaintive atmosphere was apparently quite simple. Yet it left an unshakeable impression of highly charged elusiveness, as of a half-remembered dream that unsettles and nags at us because we have either forgotten what it was trying to impart or because what it reveals is ultimately untranslatable into terms other than those contained in its form.
Fortunately, the curator at Thessaloniki proved sympathetic to my urgent need to see this film again and gave me a couple of DVDs featuring two of the Buharovs’ three features and several shorts. Watching Hotel Tubu again (and again and again and again…) confirmed my first impression: it wasn’t a case of ‘getting it’, of finding a conceptual key to this work. Instead, it held true to what remains the most accurate description of experiencing a Buharov film I’ve encountered: ‘getting lost in someone else’s dream’ (Off Screen Film Festival Catalogue, Brussels 2008). This is not to suggest that their films are without coherent ideas. They can even contain quite explicitly political ones. But they are as perfectly absorbed into the oneiric texture of these visions as any other element.

The promise of Hotel Tubu was delivered on in the Buharov films I subsequently saw, all fractured, extremely surreal movies. Darkly playful hallucinations that share the aura of having been discovered forgotten in someone’s granny’s attic, precisely revealing a world perhaps subconsciously suspected but hitherto un-describable. They have in common an improvised quality and a sense of the homemade. Not only in their beautifully rough visual textures, which are due mainly to being mostly shot on Super-8 with tiny budgets, but often in the people, objects and spaces before the camera. The casts are composed of extraordinary ordinary people rather than film stars: lived-in faces bringing their own stories to the films rather than tools trained to convey fictional confections. The props, which sometimes conspicuously reappear in different films, can likewise seem to have an existence of their own carried over into the picture. This helps lend the films the weird intimacy of children’s games, in which familiar people and places are made alien and the weirdly alien becomes immanent to the everyday. The overall look of the films varies (and often also includes rough animated shots and sequences), but almost always retains the raw appearance of a trippy home movie. The absence of any explicitly up-to-the-minute looking buildings or objects leaves this cinematic universe hovering slightly adrift from temporal specificity, somewhere in the closing decades of the 20th century. This further enhances the sense of a vague collective childhood that we continue to subconsciously inhabit.

The great Polish film director Andrzej Zulawski once made reference to ‘films you cannot tame’. Such films, at least for me, are extremely few and far between. But since my encounter with Hotel Tubu, the Buharovs have become synonymous with the idea of ‘untamed cinema’ to the exclusion of all other filmmakers. In 2010, I screened two of their short films in Cork as part of a Black Sun experimental music and film event. This year, I arranged a mini-retrospective of their work at Corona Cork Film Festival, which both Buharovs attended. Of course, the primary and overt motivation was to share exceptional and little-known work with local audiences. But I suspect a hidden, personal agenda: to see if I could finally put my finger on what it is exactly, that elusive half-remembered-dream element that drew me back to Hotel Tubu and proved present throughout their filmography. But to no avail. Their films remain gloriously ‘untamed’.