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Festival
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | November – December 2021
Fiona Hallinan, I remember oranges, you remember dust, 2019; photograph by Thomas Raggam, courtesy the artist and PhotoIreland festival.
Joanne Laws: As part of your participation in PhotoIreland Festival 2021, each of you presented photographic works, variously linked to food production, consumption and ecology. Can you discuss the themes and influences underpinning this particular body of work?
Hyperobjects JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS THREE ARTISTS EXHIBITING AT THE PHOTOIRELAND FESTIVAL 2021.
Ksenia Yurkova: In 2014, the Russian political environment was seized by the question of food. The public was mesmerised by the footage of tonnes of imported products being destroyed by massive bulldozers – these were so-called countersanctions in effect, implemented by the Russian government against the sanctions imposed by the Western countries upon Russia after the annexation of Crimea. It was especially painful to witness for those who lived in Saint Petersburg, formerly Leningrad, which still carries horrific memory of nine-hundred days of extreme inhumane starvation – the implication of the ‘hunger politics’ of the Nazi military siege in 1941, topped by the cannibalistic political decisions of the city government. I was struck by the clash of two ideologies within one field – the ideology of totalitarianism colliding with neoliberal consumerism. This indistinguishable paradox became the basis of my visual research. Fiona Hallinan: When we cook, we’re involved with tiny worlds: the multitudes of gut bacteria that impact our bigger behaviour; the nourishment of those immediately around us and ourselves; and the income of our suppliers. Simultaneously food-making engages with giant issues such as global supply chains, the environmental crisis, soil, water and ethical production – something British philosopher, Timothy Morton, describes as ‘hyperobjects’. I participated in PhotoIreland with a video assemblage for their Critical Recipes cooking channel. My video uses green screen to overlay a recipe demonstration for a comforting garlic, saffron and seaweed broth, over footage of rock pools, filmed in different locations over the past two years. Through the use of assemblage, I wanted to visually suggest the
