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by Brandon Hillard, City Center Media
Best of the Twin Cities, Arts & Entertainment
ART . VOL 23 #1110, Minneapolis, Minnesota, March 13, 2002
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A regiment of dead sunflowers towers mutely, narrow stalks splintered into
strands, shriveled heads bent downward in defeat. Above, a swirling sky
listens attentively to this unkempt stretch of Ukrainian soil, but the
landscape is silent, bearing its 70-year-old burden. More than six million
peasants starved to death here during the Soviet famine of 1932-1933, Joseph
Stalin's murderous attempt to end independent farming.
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Speak, memory landscapes reveal their troubling secrets
Photograph by Simon Norfolk
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Whether a menacing staircase at Auschwitz or a wintry Armenian telegraph
pole standing like a snowcapped crucifix, each of Simon Norfolk's
black-and-white landscape photographs stirs a memory of a 20th-century
atrocity. The 39-year-old British photographer's "Silent Witness: Genocide
in the Landscape," on display at pARTs Photographic Arts from March 16
through May 5 [2002], traverses 100 years and three continents, marching
backward through time past eight sites: Rwanda, Cambodia, Vietnam,
Auschwitz, Dresden, the Ukraine, Armenia, and Namibia.
Norfolk's career took off in the early 1990s, when he was working as a
photojournalist for the lefty publication Living Marxism and became
fascinated with fascism and far-right politics. That interest led him to
genocide, and to the public's ignorance and denial of lesser-known
human-rights atrocities. By the mid-Nineties he'd embraced landscape as an
apt metaphor: "My [work] is about memory more than genocide," says the
artist. The evaporation of physical evidence tends to lead to the
evaporation of belief: "Why do we remember Auschwitz but not Armenia?"
The images in the upcoming show are from Norfolk's 1998 book, For Most of It
I Have No Words: Genocide-Landscape-Memory; the show replaces his current
pARTs exhibit, a series of new images of war-tattered Afghanistan. Hoping to
get a sneak preview of Norfolk's talk at the gallery this Sunday afternoon,
we reached him by phone in England.
City Pages: How do landscape and remembrance play off of one another in your
book?
Simon Norfolk: Like empty cabinets. How would you document nothingness? What
would you put in a book on genocide? In a museum? These images are beautiful
because they've been emptied, not because they are empty.
CP: What's the aim behind chronologically reversing the order of the events?
Norfolk: It's like Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the novel that
inspired Apocalypse Now. Those men journey up a river in hopes of discovery.
The river becomes this sort of fading curve that descends into barbarism;
the text becomes more and more frantic. My prints sort of go in three steps:
photojournalism; evidence; the abstract empty. The transition is a fading
curve. It's much more effective than simply, "Isn't that just awful," over
and over.
CP: Your passion requires you to travel around in a lot of regions that are
politically unstable or where there's a strong anti-Western bias. Have you
ever experienced any resentment?
Norfolk: When I was in eastern Turkey, running around trying to take
pictures of churches and remnants of where the Armenians were [persecuted],
I got caught at a roadblock. These armed guards, in a big fuss, wanted to
know, "What's with all the fucking cameras?' They thought I was trying to
document their war against the Kurds, when in actuality I was searching for
genocide material on the same land, but 90 years previously. I ended up
spending five hours in a Turkish prison. They had these cattle prods. Not a
nice place to be.
Even the Turkish embassy in London kicked up a huge stink [about this
exhibit]. The government still denies what happened with the Armenians.
Denying--look, I mean, even in America today. There are museums on the
Holocaust but not one museum or memorial dedicated to the Native American
holocaust that occurred on its own soil.
CP: Was there a single inspiration for your book?
Norfolk: I studied a lot of extremists [for Living Marxism]--fascist groups.
People like David Irving--a guy who denies the Holocaust. I wanted to negate
what they were working at. Basically, my work is a political desire to piss
people off. Piss off my enemies.
What do you think?
Brandon Hillard, City Center Media, Arts & Entertainment
ART . VOL 23 #1110, Minneapolis, Minnesota, March 13, 2002
http://www.citypages.com/databank/23/1110/article10225.asp
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