Signet Library, Edinburgh until August
27
Four stars
In the foyer, Koudelka's preparatory maquettes try out Koudelka's world for size in miniature. Inside, Koudelka has left empty books for visitors to imagine their own worlds on the pages. In an otherwise lonely place, it's something new to build on.
Four stars
Walking the full length of the Signet
Library during this show of complementary photo essays by Czech born
but French domiciled photographer Josef Koudelka, it initially feels
as if you're striding through an airport lounge, that vast and
teeming thoroughfare of free movement en route to arrivals and
departures. Two rows of glass-topped display cabinets that contain
the two displays disrupt the space. Placed there deliberately by
human hand, they act as both barrier and gateway, each side in
opposition and conjoined defiance.
So it goes too for the contents of the
cases, two monumental twenty metre long concertina books with their
black and white pages laid out to tell a story of landscapes
modified, remodelled and ultimately defiled in the name of progress.
The first, Black Triangle (1994), charts how the Czech Republic's
once heavily populated Ore mountain region was overwhelmed and
gradually devastated by the coal mining industry. The second, Wall
(2013), follows the route of the ongoing atrocity of the wall
dividing Israel and Palestine.
Like stills from an Antonioni film, where the natural world and the big city industrial dustbin meet, not one person is in view in Koudelka's images. Their mark is everywhere, however, in a fiercely emotive but exquisitely calm display. This is the case whether in the dumped tyres, or the steel constructions impaling the land in Black Triangle, or the city lights at a distance from the incomplete concrete curtain that carves out false borders. The captions that run beneath each image are forensic and understated, their bald facts becoming a kind of minimalist poetry about how communities were destroyed and dispersed by profit and ideology led social engineering.
Like stills from an Antonioni film, where the natural world and the big city industrial dustbin meet, not one person is in view in Koudelka's images. Their mark is everywhere, however, in a fiercely emotive but exquisitely calm display. This is the case whether in the dumped tyres, or the steel constructions impaling the land in Black Triangle, or the city lights at a distance from the incomplete concrete curtain that carves out false borders. The captions that run beneath each image are forensic and understated, their bald facts becoming a kind of minimalist poetry about how communities were destroyed and dispersed by profit and ideology led social engineering.
In the foyer, Koudelka's preparatory maquettes try out Koudelka's world for size in miniature. Inside, Koudelka has left empty books for visitors to imagine their own worlds on the pages. In an otherwise lonely place, it's something new to build on.
The Herald, August 2017
ends
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