SIMON STARLING – RECENT HISTORY
2011-02-07In his first major UK exhibition since winning the Turner Prize in 2005, Starling employs video, film, slides, photography and sculpture to aid his understanding of the material world. Constructing a replica of the Pier Art Centre gallery space in Stromness, his exploration of the relationship between culture and nature is an uncanny one. The exhibition will also include The Long Ton 2009, a sculpture featuring two rough-cut white lumps of marble suspended in space and Red Rivers, 2008 a video work which brings together the stories of two journeys made a century apart: the first a nineteenth century anthropological expedition into the Congo to capture and document the elusive and little known Okapi; the second a journey made by Starling down the Hudson River in a handmade strip canoe, culminating at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City where specimens of the Okapi finally ended up in a famous ‘diorama’. Taking the form of a series of still images, the video is as much a meditation on the fast disappearing processes of photography itself.
Opposite – The Long Ton, 2009
Exhibition runs through to May 2nd, 2011
Tate St Ives
International Modern and Contemporary Art
Porthmeor Beach
St Ives
Cornwall
TR26 1TG
