Interview with Edmund Clark

01/02/18

Interview: Edmund Clark

Edmund Clark: In Place of Hate
Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
6 December 2017 – 11 March 2018

Edmund Clark: The Day the Music Died
International Center of Photography, New York
26 January – 6 May 2018

Edmund Clark: The Mountains of Majeed
Flowers, New York

27 January – 3 March 2018

Edmund Clark isn’t one to pick easy subjects for his work. As an editorial photographer, he found himself working with teenage fathers and elderly prisoners, and this set him on his route to working with terror suspects, prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, and, most recently, a three-year residency at the UK’s only wholly therapeutic prison, HMP Grendon, where he worked with the inmates to produce four new bodies of challenging work, each employing methods new to his practice, which are now on show at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.

Pressed flowers trapped within a lightbox enclosure, the size of an average cell (1.98m²); a five-screen film of journeys around the prison’s corridors, grounds and perimeter (Vanishing Point); a film and book (My Shadow’s Reflection) comprising architectural images of the prison and pinhole camera images of the prisoners – blurred beyond recognition and speaking, Clark says, of how prisoners are not really seen in contemporary political discourse; and a longer 74-minute film work (Oresteia), showing a form of psychodrama episode, based on the Greek tragedy, with prisoners playing – and responding to – the various characters, exploring notions of acceptable violence, catharsis and empathy.

Clark has also recently spent time on Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, taking photographs, which evoke the intangible yet intensely felt presence of the mountains beyond and the unseen insurgents they hide. These, along with reproductions of paintings of the mountains found at the base, and a towering column of razor wire, comprise a second exhibition at Flowers New York.

Simultaneously, Clark is having his first major solo exhibition in the US at the International Center of Photography, New York, where he is showing a cross-section of his work exploring structures of power and control in the global war on terror. Although Clark sees his work as political, he is adamant he is not an activist, but a “harmless, liberal artist”.

Watch the interview here

Review of Portrait of the Artist: Käthe Kollwitz at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

Portrait of the Artist: Käthe Kollwitz

Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

13 September – 26 November 2017

“I was determined to be an artist from the outset, even though I had the disadvantage of being a girl.”

Her gender was not Käthe Kollwitz’s only disadvantage, as a graphic artist (at a time when this was the least prized – and least well paid for – of the visual arts), living in the "bohemian" workers’ district of Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, and surviving two world wars. This aside, she enjoyed, from the outset, the support of her family, husband, and friends. Thanks to this, her determination, and, in no small measure, her talent, Kollwitz (1867-1945) met with great success. Today, she has four museums dedicated solely to her work and, in her native Germany, there are 40 schools that bear her name. In 1920, she became the first woman to be elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts, an honour that brought with it a full professorship, albeit that she rejected the title owing to her communist leaning for egalitarianism. Her work was shown in New York in 1922, she was the subject of many books and articles, and the first big monograph on her work was published as early as 1923. Despite her prints being widely reproduced in China and Russia, she is sadly little known in the UK, where only three of her drawings – and not all that many of her prints – are held in public collections. This enlightening and carefully selected exhibition has been put together in collaboration with the British Museum – comprising 36 works from its collection, plus four loans – by Frances Carey, the former deputy keeper of prints and drawings. Marking the 150th anniversary of Kollwitz’s birth, it will tour to the Young Gallery, Salisbury; the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea; the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull; and end up "home" at the British Museum in 2019.

Read the full review here