Untitled II (For M.)

The Observatory, University College London - July 2004
 

Conceived both as a eulogy and a meditation on violence, fear and loss, ‘Untitled II (for M.)’ references a traumatic event through word, image and object relations across series of displaced sites.The work engages with an event that took place at Victoria Park in London in 2003.  The event, condensed into four lines of poetry, is first resituated within a domestic corridor space by projecting the lines of the poem through a sculptural apparatus made up of 209 pieces of hanging mirrored glass. Here the text becomes fragmented and refracted onto the surrounding surfaces. Resituated in a disused Observatory, only six shards of the original 209 mirrored glass pieces remain as part of the sculptural apparatus for ‘Untitled II (for M.)’. However, the sound accompanying the piece, recorded by sound artist Mikhail Karikis, is taken from the first incarnation of the artwork. The poem, again projected through the apparatus, is fragmented and refracted to create a dynamic constellation of moving word-images on the interior walls of the Observatory. The work was exhibited as part of the ‘(Dis)locating Specificity’ conference at University College London.
 

Untitled (For M.)

Video Documentation (3 min, 10 sec)