Loss of Horizon — Claire de Carteret

Inspired by the thinking of Hito Streyl, Alvin Toffler, Henriette Gunkel, Ayesha Hamed, Octavia Butler and Mark Fisher, the curation draws from the notion that the horizon is no longer a stable perspective onto the future and that we currently inhabit a condition of free-fall.

"As you are falling, your sense of orientation may start to play additional tricks on you. The horizon quivers in a maze of collapsing lines and you may lose any sense of above and below, of before and after, of yourself and your boundaries. Traditional modes of seeing and feeling are shattered. Any sense of balance is disrupted. Perspectives are twisted and multiplied. New types of visuality arise" - Hito Steyerl

This exhibition considers different frameworks of vertigo and disorientation as starting points to re-imagine temporal senses and a fragmented sense of being in the world. Bringing together five artists; Jacquie Meng, Neil Beedie, Claire Welch, Jemima Lucas, Brigitte Podrasky, Loss of Horizon invites different meditations on navigating destabilisation.

Installation photography by Brett East

There are many ways to fall. Amongst them, you can fall down, fall apart and fall in love. Each new way of falling is predicated on a relocation of the self to somewhere new. Each new way of falling also requires the acknowledgement of the passage of time as the price paid for the movement from point A to point B. To fall in love can happen as rapidly as falling out of love, however, it can also be excruciatingly slow, demanding that you are acutely aware of each descending moment. Nevertheless, you have relocated, you are not where, or how, you previously were. Sometimes we find ourselves at our new destination without acknowledging the journey it took to get there. You can be on your face in an instant, not knowing where it all went wrong. The choreography of the falling body is congruent with the chronometry of falling time, creating the unique circumstances for the transformative qualities of disequilibrium and freefall. In order to fall through the spatial, one must fall through the temporal. In order to fall through the temporal, one must fall through the spatial. As Laurie Anderson describes this process in 1983’s Walking and Falling, ‘over and over, you’re falling. And then catching yourself from falling. And this is how you can be walking and falling at the same time.’

Vertigo is often presented as the perceptual embodiment of falling without the corporal reality of movement. However, this belies the physical transformational aspects of vertigo. Vertigo can move you. Vertigo is an inherently dynamic motion. It arises situationally, spatially, and temporarily, and combines discordant elements: tumult and permanence, termination and construction, creation and evolution, uncertainty and motion. It can make clear or obfuscate, cause upheaval and move heaven and earth. As a state of existence, the physically destabilising nature of vertigo indicates a temporal opening toward possible transformation and innovation.1 ‘Many people purposefully and joyfully search for states of vertigo, relishing moments of blissful disorientation, self-abandonment, and catharsis.’2 François Jullien understands a ‘fertile’ moment of dizziness to exist wherein, due to a loss of equilibrium and the person being ‘suspended from clearness,’ new ways of thinking can be found. It is apparent that to fall from within is a formidable feeling, a catalyst for conception and physical change.

But when does this change occur? With the culmination of the fall? Too often the transformative nature of flux is measured only when is has smashed into the pavement, its shards spirited away for collection, the remainder trickling into retrospective.

excerpt from exhibition essay by Mitchell Krewaz