//// //// //// //// ////
//// //// //// /
‘DOES GOD LIVE IN THE NO-FLY ZONE’
SE BARNET and THE KIT COLLABORATION
This exhibition will be anticipated by the first in the series of:
THE EMPTY GALLERY INTERVIEWS by Claire Nichols and Altair Roelants.
This is a live conversation piece in which art writers Claire Nichols and Altair Roelants will talk with artist S.E Barnet and exhibition curator Michelle Deignan about the upcoming show Does God Live in the No Fly Zone This interview will offer an insight into the methodology that informs Barnet and The Kit Collaboration’s site specific response to the Five Years gallery; tracing their evolving relationship to the space in the lead up to installing their work.
The interview will take place inside the empty gallery at Five Years on:
Tuesday 17 February 2009 at 6.30pm
m
m
To confirm your place and for further enquiries rsvp to: theemptygalleryinterviews@googlemail.com
‘Does God Live In The No-Fly Zone’ is a photographic and sound installation examining the zoned, nationalised and policed space above us.
SE Barnet and The KIT Collaboration take a look at the restricted airspace above the dwellings of selected Heads of States in cities such as London, Berlin, Paris and Moscow. Their images capture the act of looking up into the nationalized sky, a space of covert restrictions, surveillance, threat and anxiety. The photographs are accompanied by Symphony for No Fly Zones, a twelve hour audio work. This uses layers of national anthems, slowed and transformed into a textured sonic universe.
No-Fly Zones open up vertical channels from the earth, gateways for ascension. The notion of looking for a deity or God in a No-Fly Zone is absurd and futile, as futile as the creation of territorial boundaries in the sky, exemplified by the aerial transgressions witnessed globally during 9/11 of 2001. The search for a higher being in a military zone questions the ascendancy of military space over religious space. The sky was once an expansive territory, which was theoretically structured by religious doctrine. Now, it is filled with the verse and chapter of the military industrial complex. Has a collective notion of ascension lost its impetus due to the implementation of a set of military markers that splice the sky and render the trajectory of the escape velocity as a restricted ‘no man’s land’?
The ocular technology used to extend the eyes and reach of the Western empire is the same one that ultimately renders the question – ‘Does God Live In The No Fly Zone’, a rhetorical one. Satellite imaging has become the great eye in the sky, that which can encompass the earth with a wink of a digital impulse. Our project positions the search for God as an illusory question of an illusory goal.
S.E. Barnet makes art works that begin with open-ended scenarios around collaboration, interaction, and authorship. She has exhibited her solo and collaborative works in a range of exhibitions in international gallery spaces including: “Hotbed: Video Cultivation”, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; “The One Minutes Exhibition”, ICA, London; “Menage a Trois”, American Academy in Rome; and “Stories of Work and Survival” MOCA, Tehran, Iran. She is currently pursuing a PhD in fine art practice at Kingston University in the UK.
The KIT Collaboration has produced over eighty gallery-based installations and offsite works around the world since 1996 including: ‘Infrasonoso’, The Ben Maltz Gallery; Los Angeles; ‘Missing Mass’, Gallery 44: Centre for Contemporary Photography , Toronto; ‘Poi.n-t (Place of Impact. Net-Transfer)’, Blasthaus, San Francisco. The socio-politically directed artworks utilise electronic media such as robots, video games, speaker systems, video and GPS to convey their narratives.
http://www.kitcollaboration.net