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Brighton Photo Biennial 2006 - A Picture Book Of Britain At Charleston
By Olivia Laing
12/10/2006
Henna Nadeem, A Picture Book of Britain (2006). Courtesy the artist and Photoworks
Olivia Laing pulled on her Wellingtons, donned her Barbour and set out to explore Henna Nadeem’s thoroughly modern take on the British landscape.
Brighton plays host to the second Brighton Photo Biennial in October, bringing work by an international cast of artists to a series of venues across the city. One of the ten exhibitions is Henna Nadeem’s A Picture Book of Britain, running until 29 October 2006.
But not for Nadeem the Regency splendour of the Royal Pavilion or the concrete curves of the Gardner Arts Centre. As befits an exhibition concerned with portraying the British countryside, A Picture Book of Britain is to be found at Charleston Farmhouse, once the rural outpost of the Bloomsbury Group, a mile up an old farm track in deepest Sussex.
Despite the farmyard setting, A Picture Book of Britain does not offer a rose-tinted vision of the pastoral idyll. Nadeem’s work is far more complex and challenging the simple title might at first glance suggest.
Image: a photograph of a woodland scene which has shapes superimposed over the top of it
Henna Nadeem, A Picture Book of Britain (2006). Courtesy the artist and Photoworks
The images that form the basis for Nadeem’s collages derive from a series of picture books published by Country Life in the 1960s. These dewy landscape photographs were imbued with nostalgia, portraying a Britain of tradition and stability where nothing had changed for centuries, and seemingly nothing would.
Nadeem’s collages, commissioned by the South East visual arts organisation Photoworks, challenge these smug assumptions, reconfiguring the original images into collages that are at once charming and disturbing.
Nadeem has used Islamic and other non-Western abstract patterns to transform the British landscape, setting two very different artistic traditions into a collaboration that sometimes veers uncomfortably close to conflict.
Image: a collaged and manipulated photograph based on an english village scene
Henna Nadeem, A Picture Book of Britain (2006). Courtesy the artist and Photoworks
From a distance, the collages appear to show pleasingly abstract shapes. Close up, the whorls, tiles and spirals are revealed to be composed of slices of lakes, beaches, sunlit woodlands and snowy fields.
Like magic, the seemingly stable and permanent landscape of 1960s Britain is reconfigured into patterns that confront the viewer with the constant possibility of change.
A photograph of an audience watching a maypole dance – clearly once a statement of the unchanging traditions of British rural life – has been subtly reconfigured into a pattern that resembles nothing so much as a lace doily. Pieces are missing, or have been oddly juxtaposed. Nothing, Nadeem seems to say, is stable; we are always in flux.
Henna Nadeem, A Picture Book of Britain (2006). Courtesy the artist and Photoworks
Sometimes, these images can verge on the nightmarish. The timeless seamless Britain as Country Life conceived it, is exposed as a sham, quite literally full of holes. Rivers jerk off their courses, villages lose their centre and whole towns turn into a mass of writhing, senseless streets. The fragments that can be gleaned seem oppressive, claustrophobic and almost ridiculously old fashioned.
But there is also a childlike playfulness to Nadeem’s work, and it seems that she is not immune to the countryside’s charms. A collage of a cathedral and choristers amidst snowy fields is just as beautiful as the original must once have been. It stands as an elegy for a landscape that, though constantly in flux and threatened by the ugly extensions of modern life, has not yet lost its power.
Another collage, showing spider web-like shards of sunlight penetrating through a sunny wood, reminds us of the most important point: that change does not only bring loss; it also is vital if we want to grow.
Charleston
Charleston, Near Firle, Lewes, BN8 6LL, East Sussex, England
T: 01323 811265
Open: April-October
Wed-Sun & Bank holidays
Wed & Sat 11.30 - 1800
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Sun & Bank holidays 1400-1800
Last entry 1700
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