Lundy, Louis, Barge and Troy
- Submitting institution
-
Middlesex University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 1018
- Type
- Q - Digital or visual media
- Publisher
- -
- Month
- September
- Year
- 2014
- URL
-
http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/18415/
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- ‘Lundy, Louis, Barge and Troy’ is a large scale two-channel video and sound installation that was commissioned by the 4th Çanakkale Biennial and produced in 2014. Conceptually and pictorially the work is constructed by two components: one screen presents the shipwrecks of the Allied fleet sunk during the Dardanelles Campaign of the First World War. The second screen shows the bustle of contemporary vessels crisscrossing the blue waters above.
The work’s title is composed by the names of the ships as they appear sequentially in the edit of the footage, which implies that the battleships perished along the same axis one following another. The camera tracks slowly over the length of the sunken ships from a 90-degree angle, thus revealing them from an unfamiliar bird’s eye perspective, which in turn renders their real scale incomprehensible. The decaying remnants of the ships are both hauntingly beautiful and menacing - we cannot escape thoughts about the circumstances of their ill fate.
However, the work does not attempt to illustrate or narrate these ominous acts of war. Instead, it endeavours to signify the importance of the act of sombre remembrance and reconciliation. This is further emphasized by the installation that presents the footage cinematographically over two angled, vertically positioned and set apart large screens acting like gates of heaven and hell, past and present. Furthermore, the work correlates with the video installation Downward Straits (2004), which was filmed on the other end of Marmara Sea, at the Bosporus in Istanbul. The liminal zone of the strait that separates East from West at the Bosporus is now repositioned along the vertical axis looking down and upwards, so as to imply a proactive space between existence and non-existence. This inversion of space represents simultaneously a point of reflection and spatial displacement.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -