Installation: Surveillance, Assemblage, Moving Image and Audio

Dimensions variable

Having Forged an alliance with local orphans a plan was hatched to move the Sleeping Lion of Bytom. Being well travelled it was clear that the lion would be alert to the slightest disturbance. The orphans sang sweet lullabies, shared dreams and whispered wishes into his ears. A rope was tied around his stone perch and with it the lion was dragged across the smallest of small distances.

The installation brings together threads from disparate narratives in which the historical, imaginary and contemporary status of identity is fought over. Stereotypes are overloaded and exposed for their ludicrously shallow foundations. The Silesian reality is clear to see in the scarified fragments of Bytom, its continually shifting ground and identities. Leeched dry, depleted by invasion and occupation, coated in the stark grey dust of its stolen wealth. This colonised land has a fragile tension.

The viewer is required to engage with a narrative of asynchronous frames. Not sequential linear time in cartographic space. Rather a freefall into a constellation of matter, time and absence.

The birds eye view has upgraded to digital mode, affording advance warning of any stirring.

 

The willing lion soon lay down;
They pared his claws, his teeth they filed.
So easily is love beguiled!
He looked like a dismantled town.

La Fontaine, The Lion In Love, Fables