Ghost Sensations / Machine Dreams
A photographic intervention into the collection of
The Nordic Library at Athens
May 21 - June 18 - 2025
The Nordic Library at Athens is a cooperative international research facility established and maintained by the archaeological and cultural institutes of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Its collection of approximately 40,000 volumes concerns the fields of the archaeology of Greece, ancient Greek religion, and ancient and modern Greek histories. For the past five years the Nordic Library at Athens have generously supported my creative and scholarly research through the provision of a dedicated research office. The exhibition Ghost Sensations / Machine Dreams presents, for the first time in Greece, one of the bodies of my work that has been generated during that period. The exhibition is a gesture of my appreciation of their ongoing support.
The exhibition presents a suite of 10 gelatin silver darkroom prints on fibre-based paper.
Print size 38 x 37.5 cm
Framed size 57.5 x 56 cm
SEE THE SUITE OF WORKS HERE
The practice of archaeology and the practice of photography have a long and complex relationship. This exhibition, and the body of work that it presents, aims to bring fresh ways of looking at and thinking about that much studied relationship, and it asks us to reconsider notions of authority in relation to text and image.
The Greek word for monument - μνημεío (mnimeío) shares its origins with the word for memory – μνήμη (mními), and it is in this way that the flickering, fleeting, ephemeral is always there in the background of the monumental and its allusions to permanence and power.
P.P. Pasolini decried the notion that monuments and grand sanctioned sweeping narratives (themselves monuments of a sort) are the way that history is recorded. Rather, he favored the records of the flickering and fleeting, the ephemeral everyday occurrences which he termed lucciole - fireflies.
I remember a conversation that I had with an elderly Greek woman in Heraklion who lived across the hall from a man I was close to for some time. Maria had grown up in Athens, one day she asked me what it is that I love about Athens, I spoke to her about the qualities of Athenian light, as I did her eyes smiled and she said, “you can only imagine what it was like when I was a girl, 80 years ago.”
In the winter of 2021, the Athenian air was uncharacteristically clear. A rare coalescence between reduced traffic flows, silenced industry (courtesy of Covid quarantines), and heavy snowfalls that came that year with polar storms sweeping down from the North, cleansed the skies of light diffusing particles. As the air changed so too did the light.
The images in this exhibition were captured during that winter. In the coldest hour, the hour before the sun rises. Working with a series of limitations - the lightspace that separates night from day, the F-stop and aperture capabilities of the 1970’s Hassleblad C500 camera that I shoot film on, the Covid related curfews and movement restrictions - I created these images in the empty, silent, typically tourist teeming archaeological sites in the centre of Athens. In layered spectral states they flicker in and out of solidity, as they tease out the accretive relationships we unconsciously form with the places we live in. Ghosts appear and disappear, reappearing again and again, palimpsests of individual experience, desire, love, loss, hope, pouring unconsciously into our exquiste mess of collective memory.
