Art|Unlimited

70 |Art Unlimited
RUNA ISLAM
Title | Emergence, 2011
Media |35mmcolor film, silent; 2min 54 sec; edition of 3
Artist |Runa Islam, *1970, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Lives and works in London, United Kingdom
Gallery |White Cube
White Cube
GB -London N1 6PB |48Hoxton Square
Phone +44 2079305373|Fax +44 2077497480
enquiries@whitecube.com |www.whitecube.com
Directors |Jay Jopling, Daniela Gareh, Tim Marlow, Susan May
Artwork Description | Emergence is a35mmsilent film that was originally shown at the Museum of
Modern Art,New York, for the exhibition Projects 95: Runa Islam in 2011. Runa
Islam’s work is often presented as acinematic experience that exposes the
process of filmmaking itself within aunique architectural configuration. Emergence
evolved out of the discovery ofanold glass plate negative of ablackand-white
photograph ofearly 20th-century Tehran, found by the artist in the
Smithsonian archive. As the film unfolds from its purely abstract opening shot –
acrack inthe center of the screen –weglimpse asheet of paper being dipped
into achemical bath, and an image on its surface slowly appears before our
eyes. Bathed in the glow from the photographic darkroom, the surrounding space
of the installation makes the viewer feel as if they have entered the intimacy
of the darkroom itself. The fissure weglimpsed earlier reveals itself as part of
the overall picture ofagroup of stray dogs, scavenging the carcasses of dead
horses in the dusty grounds of what could be apalace. The violence of the image
is counteracted by its stark, monochromatic beauty but reinforced by the damaged
glass negative the work derives from. Both poetic and conceptual, Islam’s
work has been described by curator Christian Rattemeyer as inhabiting ‘the
boundaries between visibility and invisibility, legibility and silence, stability and
instability, syntactical simplicity and symbolic complexity.’
Emergence, 2011
Exhibition view, Projects 95:
Runa Islam, The Museum of
Modern Art,New York, 2011