Burning poems is a unique project by a UK artist Pam Skelton inspired by life and work of a Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. The exhibition opens in Sochi on 12 October 2007. The artist herself will attend the opening.
Pam Skelton’s art deals with the complex relationship of history and memory, both personal and collective. Her subject of inquiry is the gap between the memories of individuals who happened to be party to a historical event, on the one hand, and the way this event is represented in the collective memory of succeeding generations, on the other. More often than not her work has been inspired by a place that retains the memory of an historical tragedy, but the artist’s interest very often centres on the lives of particular individuals. It can be the unknown lives of common people, who selflessly fought to control the consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster (Liquidators project), or the life of a prisoner miraculously surviving a Nazi concentration camp (Ponar). But it can also be that of a heroic historical figure, a poet who became “the conscience of one’s generation”.
The video installation Burning Poems consists of projections onto three screens, connected as episodes whose sequence is not established, as if each episode were timeless. The installation itself is placed beyond any particular space; originally, it was displayed amongst the Akhmatova Museum's permanent collection, but now it is displayed in a neutral exhibition space. Thus, Pam Skelton’s installation appeals to the viewer’s available knowledge and memory, both cultural and personal.
Its episodes are based on real events in Anna Akhmatova’s life in the 1930s and 1940s. Each of them - Akhmatova’s burning of her manuscripts, her meeting with the English philosopher Isaiah Berlin, her being kept under surveillance - tells us of Akhmatova’s stubborn resistance to a totalitarian regime, paying for her creative freedom with the bitter hardships that befell her and her son.
Pam Skelton was born in Harrogate, England in 1949 and lives and works in London. Her artworks investigate geographies, histories and identities in post world war II Europe which are explored in relationship to the histories which inform specific spaces through the production of video works, paintings, curatorial activities and essay’s. Her works explore absences and amnesia in relation to these sites and histories in the aftermath of the Holocaust and Cold War. The body as history is also an active site of investigation and Skelton has explored the influence of genetics in re-defining the ‘other’ for example, the immigrant or refugee.
(Curator: Elena Zaitseva)
Dates: 12-31 October 2007
Location: Sochi Fine Arts Museum, Kurortny prospekt, 5, Sochi
Contact: Maria Senatskaya
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