Simon Faithfull: Elsewhen

Image: ‘Quenanville as Antipode’ (detail), slideshow + 11 digital prints, 2014

The solo exhibition ‘Elsewhen’ brings together a series of works and interventions by internationally acclaimed artist Simon Faithfull that collectively act as a kind of orientation device for both the artist and the visitor to Hestercombe Gallery.

Many of Faithfull’s works endeavour to subjectively map the planet that the artist finds himself on – attempting to understand his place in both time and space.

Faithfull often tries to bring back personal accounts of far-flung places and to create what he calls ‘An Expanding Atlas of Subjectivity’. More importantly though, the artworks also try to connect the local, everyday scale of our normal lives to the wider, global scale of the planet. Faithfull’s works for this exhibition have been selected in an attempt to place the viewer against a planetary scale of both space and time.

Our inability to deal easily with these huge scales however means that this ‘orientation device’ can in fact feel more ‘disorientating’ rather than reassuring. The artworks ask questions about where we find ourselves and perhaps undermine some of our comfortable delusions about the stability and certainty of our place within the wider universe – orientation as an aid to getting lost!

Simon Faithfull Performance Lecture – 9th March, 2.30pm

Join Simon Faithfull for a performance lecture looking at the history, allure and possible evaporation of the place called ‘Nowhere’ and imaging a point outside time called ‘Elsewhen’.

About Simon Faithfull

Simon Faithfull is a contemporary artist, based in Berlin, whose work has been exhibited extensively around the world. His work has been described as an attempt to understand and explore the planet as a sculptural object – to test its limits and report back from its extremities. Within his work Faithfull often builds teams of scientists, technicians and transmission experts to help him bring back a personal vision from the ends of the world.

Recent projects include recording an island that vanishes into the North Sea, (featured in this exhibition), live-video transmission from a ship as it was deliberately sunk to create an artificial reef), and 0º00 Navigation part II; (a journey tracing the 0º line of longitude across Europe and Africa).

Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Galerie Polaris (Paris, 2017), Sprinhornhof Kunstverein, (Germany, 2016), Le Musée des Beaux-Arts Calais (France, 2015), and ICIA (Bath, UK, 2015) as well as group shows at R, Schloss Biesdorf (Berlin 2017), Asia Culture Centre (Gwanju, South Korea, 2016), Turner Contemporary (Margate, UK 2015), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2013), and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (Australia, 2012).