The only ray of light from an apartment block on Tongil Street, Pyongyang, North Korea (2011), photograph by Hendrik Schwartz.
Apparently, North Korea’s supply of electricity is too small to keep shining through the night. Entire streets shut down, and people go to bed early.
Joseph Gandy, ‘Buildings of Sir John Soane’ (1818)
Watercolour of an imaginary room filled with the architect John Soane‘s models.
Pavel Sterec, ‘I don’t believe in past lives’ (2008)
Series of photographs of dead ends of tunnels inside a mine in Pribyslav, established by prospectors’ mistake. After the mine had been worked on for about 10 years, nothing had been found and the mine was left abandoned.
Soldat Eugène Bouret, Soldat Ernest François Macken, Soldat Benoît Manillier, Soldat Francisque Pitiot, Soldat Claudius Urbain, Soldat Francisque Jean Aimé Ducarre, 06:30 / 7.9.1914 Soldat Jules Berger, Soldat Gilbert Gathier, Soldat Fernand Louis Inclair, 07:45 / 12.9.1914 Vanémont, Vosges, Lorraine
Soldat Alphonse Brosse, Soldat Jean Boursaud, 0:700 / 10.10.1914 Ambleny, Aisne, Picardie
Private Joseph Byers, Private Andrew Evans, Time unknown / 6.2.1915 Private George E. Collins, 07:30 / 15.2.1915 Six Farm, Loker, West-Vlaanderen
From the series ‘Shot at Dawn’, by Chloe Dewe Mathews.
‘Shot at Dawn’ focuses on the sites at which British, French and Belgian troops were executed for cowardice and desertion between 1914 and 1918. The series comprises twenty-three photographs, each depicting a location at which the soldiers were shot. These executions would usually take place in the early morning, before the battle started. All the photographs were taken as close as possible to the precise time at which the executions occurred.
William Hogarth‘s ‘Time smoking a picture’ (1822)
The quotation in Greek written on the upper part of the frame reads, “Time is not a great artist but weakens all he touches.”
Jean-Baptiste Ganne
Jean-Baptiste Ganne, Untitled (All that Glitters is Gold) (2007)
Installation in the water tank of the roman Villa Medici, 2007.
TAILS (Effet placebo). Between radical criticism of government organisations and simple prostitution the gap can appear extremely small. Pouring the budget that is supposedly attributed to the production of an artwork out onto the ground, would be a way of lowering the legal tender (the sign of value), of spreading it about, immobilising it. Then making it both the subject and the object of the piece(s).
HEADS (Et fait place au beau). Everything will be read as a “fountain-making”. And the multiplication of figures. Of those born from the waters and money of antiquity. Make a hundred thousand Boticellian Venuses glitter under the flow of raindrops from the natural fountain that the water tank at the Villa Medici is, like a hundred thousand wishes impossible to formulate.