pass shadow, whisper shade brings together new work by the six participants in the 2024 Satellites Programme: Clarinda Tse, Emelia Kerr Beale, Hannan Jones, Josie KO, Katherine Fay Allan and Rowan Markson.
The title borrows from an Irish proverb, 'Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine', roughly translating as 'people live in each other’s shadows', or, ‘we rely on each other for shelter.’ Both a shade and a shadow, this kind of shelter encompasses the positive and negative aspects of being part of a community, living in the shadow of each other and our ancestors.
Across a range of distinctive and individual practices and media, the works signal something of the complexity of inheritance, raising questions of how we process and make sense of that which we inherit, the expansive multiplicity of legacies passed down by and through earlier generations – be that material, cultural, genetic or spiritual, wanted and unwanted – and how this informs how we inhabit ourselves and the world in the present day and into the future.
Clarinda Tse’s work Shower Duster II, is a sculptural-sound installation that conjures a shower room in a cave. Alongside sculptural elements made from biomaterials like seaweed, a soundscape is created using objects inherited from Tse’s grandfather made from bronze, wood, and animal shell, previously used in the realm of Chinese metaphysics and fortune telling. The work brings ancestral knowledge, futurism, and domesticity into conversation and asks what kind of sensory connection we can find in today’s late-capitalist, screen-based era?
Hannan Jones’ moving image work Hiraeth, a 16mm film, takes its narrative from a family legend, tapping into themes of love, belonging, and resilience – an amalgamation of history, fable, and personal memory. Hiraeth is a Welsh word that conveys a spiritual sense of belonging – closely mirroring the meaning of the Arabic name ‘Haneen’, which also denotes longing and compassion. (The artist thanks Leena Nammari for sharing this parallel and insight.) The soundtrack of the film originated from Jones’ work with Rhubaba Choir, inspired by her family’s long line of choir singers, and further perpetuated by her deep-rooted experimental sonic practice. Sound and ancestral memory come together to form a film led by a sense of belonging and a deep sense of connection for places and people across time.
Katherine Fay Allan’s video installation Gastromancy, provides a sensory passage into a world where our gut tissues and gut feeling are reimagined as characters with a story to tell. Drawing parallels between patient symptom reporting and oral folkloric storytelling, Gastromancy explores the intense longing to be ‘believed’ by another, likening the lengthy experience of seeking a medical diagnosis for a chronic condition to being haunted by the supernatural. Visual and audio compositions featured in this work have developed as a direct response to research being conducted by University of Dundee’s School of Life Sciences on the gastrointestinal system. Gastromancy offers new ways to visualise our gut physiology while drawing our attention to the importance of patient stories.
Josie KO’s work explores Black British histories and has recently created monumental powerful sculptural representations of Black women, counteracting the erasure of Black women in art history. For the exhibition Josie presents a large-scale banner on the exterior classical pillars of Collective’s City Observatory, presenting a Black female figure defiantly visible and surveying the city.
Rowan Markson’s work experiments with dramaturgy and thinking with/about authorship and audience through the form, play, and order of found and made artefacts. For the exhibition he has brought together an array of things and gestures both familiar and unknown, questioning how they speak/perform in the absence of their histories and use, and whether an audience participates in a process of discovery and loss.
Emelia Kerr Beale presents diehardlove (c), a series of new works informed by urban explorer forums, the 19thcentury Luddite rebellion by textile workers in the East Midlands, and the demolition of their dad’s garment factory. The resulting work thinks through loss, generational knowledge, preservation and resistance, and emerges as found photographs, sculpture and sound.
Through the exhibition, familial and personal stories of survival are granted equal weighting to official histories, and mythological epics. pass shadow, whisper shade, becomes an invocation to process that which has been passed down to us and to allow the shadows to pass ‘Into that dark permanence of ancient forms’ (John Montague) – an invitation to sit with the complexity in close connection together under the shade.
Find out more about the artists here.
Collective is supported by Creative Scotland and the City of Edinburgh Council.
Collective’s media partner for its 40th anniversary year is The Skinny.