Sven Augustijnen: The Metronome Bursts of Automatic Fire Seep Through the Dawn Mist Like Muffled Drums and We Know It for What It Is

Thursday 8 September 2016 – Sunday 15 January 2017
Sven Augustijnen: The Metronome Bursts of Automatic Fire Seep Through the Dawn Mist Like Muffled Drums and We Know It for What It Is | Thursday 8 September 2016 – Sunday 15 January 2017 | Hugh Lane Gallery

Belgian artist Sven Augustijnen creates a new storyboard installation for The Hugh Lane’s Artist as Witness 2016 exhibition programme. The artist’s selection of TIME and LIFE magazines reveals how both weapons and journalism are entangled in the fabric of our history. He installs the magazines in chronological order and his meticulous editing of image and article provokes a collision with the values of freedom and capitalism as embodied in these publications. Augustijnen transforms information into sculpture. The pages selected date from the late 1950s to 2016 and present profound political and social upheavals which are repeatedly mirrored in our current news; a devastating critique on the ongoing tragic spectacle of war and its production.

The exhibition title is a quote from one of the selected reports in LIFE magazine* and is an allusion to the sound of the F.A.L – a light semi-automatic rifle manufactured in Belgium by Fabrique Nationale d’Herstal. During the Cold War this rifle was nicknamed the “right arm of the free world”. It was adopted by the armies of more than 70 countries and produced under license in a dozen, including the U.K., Israel, South Africa, India, Brazil and Argentina. However it did not take long for it to appear on both sides of the ideological spectrum, as depicted by TIME and LIFE magazines.

In this exhibition Sven Augustijnen argues that Europe has yet come to terms with the ghosts of its histories and our colonial legacies continue to influence our lives and our ways of thinking. In his work the traditional codes of documentary practice appear both expanded and undermined. His art challenges received notions of social memory and symbolic experience. He views journalism and history as inseparable from fiction, ritual and metaphor in constructing our living memory and our current and future realities.

* John Saar, ‘Hunting for Mukti Bahini Behind the Lines,’ LIFE magazine, 10 December 1971, p34

Sven Augustijnen lives and works in Brussels. He has had solo shows at Wiels, Centre for Contemporary Art, Brussels; de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam; Malmö Konsthall; Vox, Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal; CCS Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson. Upcoming group shows include The Unfinished Conversation: Encoding/Decoding, Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon and Gestures and archives of the present, genealogies of the future, Taipei Biennale.

____

Artist’s Talk: Sven Augustijnen

5.30pm, 7 September 2016          

The artist will discuss his work ahead of the exhibition launch at 6.30pm. Free; no booking required though early arrival is recommended.

We also have a screening with a Q+A at the IFI the evening before:

IFI and AEMI Projections: Spectres by Sven Augustijnen

6.15pm, Tuesday 6 September

Irish Film Institute, 6 Eustace Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2

104 minutes, Belgium, 2011, Digital, Subtitled 

Sven Augustijnen’s widely acclaimed essay film follows a Belgian civil servant as he attempts to piece together the events of January 1961, the day of the assassination of the Congo’s first elected Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba.  Echoing Derrida’s Spectres of Marx the work asks pertinent questions about how a country or an individual deals with a colonial past and how a nation processes the suffering it has inflicted. Sven Augustijnen will introduce this screening and take part in a discussion afterwards. 

aemi – Supporting and Exhibiting Artists’ and Experimental Moving Image.  www.aemi.ie

See http://www.ifi.ie/ifi-aemi-projections-spectres for booking information.

Thursday 8 September 2016 – Sunday 15 January 2017
Hugh Lane Gallery
Parnell Square North
Dublin 1
Telephone: + 353 1 222 5550
info.hughlane@dublincity.ie
www.hughlane.ie
Opening hours / start times:
Tuesday 10.00 - 18:00
Wednesday 10.00 - 18:00
Thursday 10.00 - 18:00
Friday 10.00 - 17:00
Saturday 10.00 - 17:00
Sunday 11.00 - 17:00
Admission / price: Free

 
Associated sites
Design: iCulture • Privacy and cookies
day before opening reception
day of opening reception
day before open to public
day open to public
day before closing
day of closing

(e-mail addresses are not retained after the reminder is sent)