Re-Imagining Industry
SHENYANG, CHINA:
Curated by Alasdair Foster, ‘Industry re.Imagined’ is an exhibition featuring the work of three artists, each from different continents, exploring notions of industry through the lens of artistic imagination.
The chronicles of industry recount constant change: from steam, to electricity, to diesel, to nuclear and on to renewables such as wind, wave and solar. The heavy industries of steel and concrete now share the industrial space with the weightless industries of virtuality and information. As the value of things mined from the earth begins to decline, so the resources of the human mind are in the ascendant. But, for now, we stand, like the Roman god Janus, on the threshold between two worlds.
Alejandro Chaskielberg
Alejandro Chaskielberg brings a neo-Romantic perspective to the waning sugar industry in Suriname, a small nation located on the northeast edge of the South America. Shot by moonlight, the images re-stage the architecture and machinery of the former processing plant like archaeological remains.
Marcus Lyon
The complex panoramas created by Marcus Lyon map the scale and implication of globalisation, and especially the extensive network of routes by which raw materials, goods and people move around the present-day world. Part data, part poetry, his images build from the facts to create a graphic visualisation of an ineffable reality. In ‘Exodus VI’, for example, we see all the vessels navigating a small stretch of the South China Sea in the space of a few hours, aggregated into a single frame.
Roger Hanley
Finally, Roger Hanley’s photographs draw inwards from the external fields of data and information to the imaginative space of personal psychology. He finds, in the deserted industrial sites of the Australian city of Newcastle, a zone of re-imagining where light and movement evoke states of mind, bringing a fresh, ethereal yet vital life to the post-industrial landscape.
Past, present and, perhaps, a very different kind of future…
‘Industry re.Imagined’ opens on 23 April at the Festival of Industrial Photography in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, China.
Image (from the top):
© Roger Hanley ‘electroPura #24’, 2013
© Alejandro Chaskielberg ‘The Wheels’ from the series ‘Suriname Bittersweet’, 2012
© Marcus Lyon ‘Exodus VI’ West Lamma Channel, South China Sea, 2011
© Roger Hanley ‘electroPura #16’, 2013
Cultural Development Consulting 