New Visions Exhibition: Esther Shalev-Gerz, 'Echoes in Memory: the Queen’s House, Greenwich'
Exhibition: 25 October–2 March 2008
The National Maritime Museum (NMM) presents the Lithuanian-French artist Esther Shalev-Gerz as the next commission in the New Visions series of contemporary art exhibitions and commissions. Shalev-Gerz’s atmospheric installation is on show in the 17th-century Queen’s House, the artistic heart of the Museum.
Esther Shalev-Gerz is internationally recognised for her contributions to the field of art in the public realm and her consistent investigations into the nature of democracy, cultural memory and the politics of public space. Echoes in Memory: the Queen’s House, Greenwich, is a new commission by the artist, which responds to the rumours surrounding the Great Hall – the perfect cube in the centre of the historic, Queen’s House at Greenwich.
The 17th-century Queen’s House, England’s first classical building, is a rare surviving example of the work Inigo Jones, the man who revolutionized English architecture of the period. The building reflects Renaissance ideas of mathematical, classical proportion and harmony, with the 40-foot cube of the Great Hall rising through both floors of the house. It was commissioned by Anne of Denmark, wife of James I and completed in 1638 for Charles I’s French queen, Henrietta Maria, as a private ‘house of delights’, but many aspects of its early history remain enigmatic.
On its completion the Italian painter Orazio Gentileschi was commissioned to provide decorative ceiling panels for the space, Allegory of Peace and the Arts under the English Crown. Depicting Peace surrounded by the Muses and the Liberal Arts, the painting showed 24 women holding objects alluding to disciplines such as astronomy, victory, reason, arithmetic, music, geometry and fortune. In the early 18th-century Queen Anne allowed the removal of the ceiling panels, which now hang in Marlborough House.
On first visiting NMM Shalev-Gerz became fascinated by the history of the Queen’s House, the removal of Gentileschi’s painting and, with what she describes as, the Great Hall’s impressive emptiness. Throughout her practice Shalev-Gerz mines the ambiguous space between listening and telling as a site where memory and perception are strongly articulated.
Echoes in Memory begins with a series of filmed interviews with art historians and staff from the Museum. During these dialogues they discuss their responses to the building, often focusing on personal impressions that recreate the Great Hall as an imagined, or utopian, place. Shalev-Gerz initiates each conversation with anecdotes and information she has learned from the previous interview.
Shalev-Gerz describes how ‘my position was the one of a mediator. In asking questions about the stories I had heard, I inevitably was led me to another story, to another personal point of view and to another link with the building and its history. I was interested not only in what the individuals told me but also in how they relayed each anecdote: their ways of operating, what they mentioned, how they expressed themselves and how they personally became implicated in their discourses. As with Gentileschi’s painting, each person’s gestures interested me as much as what they said.’
Echoes in Memory consists of a pair of looped video screens showing the interviewees silently listening to the artist while seated in the Great Hall. These noiseless spaces between words fill the Great Hall proposing a more subjective, thoughtful engagement with the ways that history is communicated in the surrounding displays of historic painting in the Queen’s House.
The sound elements are installed in different corners of the room, creating a murmur that fills the Great Hall with a continuous discourse of fragments of history, rumours, dreams and subjective interpretations of its history. As one listens to the various narratives it becomes impossible to dissociate facts from fables, making this work a challenge to transmitted knowledge and received history.
Behind the listeners, shown in the two video components of Echoes in Memory, sculptural computer generated figures appear. Totalling 24, in an echo of Gentileschi‘s allegorical painting, each of these constructions has been inspired by women that have influenced Shalev-Gerz – artists, writers, and intimate friends. Twenty-four photographs trace the passage around the balcony of the Great Hall – each showing Shalev-Gerz’s contemporary figures standing in the space below.
Shalev-Gerz commented: ‘The Great Hall of the Queen’s House intrigued me from the very first time I visited the National Maritime Museum. This perfect cube that sits at the centre of the building struck me with its; in Echoes in Memory I explore the missing links and rumours that haunt the open, empty space.’
Lisa Le Feuvre, NMM’s Curator of Contemporary Art, says: ‘In inviting Esther Shalev-Gerz to develop this project the NMM is opening questions around the status of the museum today, highlighting it as a site for discourse and ideas. In foregrounding the subjective nature of history, Echoes in Memory underlines the constructed nature of how we understand the past. NMM explores the way that we understand our place in the world through an investigation of the sea, stars and time: these frameworks of understanding are developed through assumptions and ideas of history. Esther Shalev-Gerz’s intervention in the Great Hall is an invitation to ask questions rather than provide answers.’
Notes to editors:
1. New Visions is the contemporary art programme of the National Maritime Museum. Working with British and international artists, New Visions encourages and broadens access to the arts and deepens NMM’s engagement with its core exploration of the sea, stars and time and to the significance of Greenwich as a World Heritage Site. The Museum is a rich source of inspiration to artists: from the depths of its collections to the magnificent listed buildings, there is unrivalled potential to create newly commissioned artworks to an ever-changing audience. Previous New Visions artists include Tacita Dean, Conrad Shawcross, Faisal Abdu’Allah, Dan Holdsworth and Lawrence Weiner. In 2008 the New Visions programme will commission projects with Simon Patterson and Renée Green. Lisa Le Feuvre is the curator of the New Visions programme of contemporary art.
2. Esther Shalev-Gerz was born in Lithuania in 1948 and has lived and worked in Paris for over 20 years. Her work is included in the national collection of French art at MACVAL as well as in numerous other international collections. Her artist commissions include invitations from the cities of Paris, Weimar, Hamburg, Stockholm, Dublin and Glasgow. Shalev-Gerz is currently professor at Valand Art School, Gothenburg University, Sweden. Her work includes the Monument Against Fascism (1986), created in collaboration with Jochen Gerz for the city of Hamburg, her permanent video installation First Generation (2004) in Sweden and her installation MenschenDinge (2006) at the Buchenwald Memorial.
3. Alongside this commission by Esther Shalev-Gerz, the exhibition Lawrence Weiner: Inherent in the Rhumb Line continues to show through to December 2007. This solo exhibition by the influential American artist explores a concept underpinning maritime navigation: rhumb lines provide the most practical route for the path of a ship that maintains a fixed compass direction.
4. The National Maritime Museum – the largest museum of its kind in the world – is housed in impressively modernized historic buildings forming part of the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site. It incorporates the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and 17th-century Queen’s House. The Museum works to illustrate for everyone the importance of the sea, ships, time and the stars and their relationship with people. The Museum welcomes over 1.5 million British and international visitors a year and is also a major centre of education and research. For more information visit www.rmg.co.uk
5. This exhibition is funded by Arts Council of England, London
Issued July 2007 by the National Maritime Museum Press Office
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Sheryl Twigg or Nigel Rubenstein
National Maritime Museum Press Office
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