AIRPORTALS BY POLLY BROWN
Our friend and contributor Polly Brown opened her latest show in Amsterdam recently entitled Airportals. Polly`s new conceptually led series AIRPORTALS revolves around the politically charged process of airport security checks. Taking photographs at these points of migration is strictly forbidden, however the x-ray machines used at them can leave their mark on undeveloped photographic film – fogging and damaging the rolls, creating an unintended and abstract documentation. Created by Brown purposefully passing film through security x-ray checks around the globe from Hokkaido to South End, AIRPORTALS brings together photographs and abstracted mark making to capture ghostly echoes of these tightly controlled boarder crossings. Three years in the making, the series presents a forbidden portrait of these liminal zones in a beautiful and haunting body of work.
Passing Through by Ben Eastham
Airports are, according to Marc Augé, non-places. They’re all the same, they are homogenous. In the French anthropologist’s analysis, these ‘spaces of circulation’ make possible the kind of ‘supermodern’ lifestyle
that is predicated on the free movement of people, ideas and capital. Like those other archetypal non-places – shopping malls, franchised hotels, motorway service stations – they are intended to be frictionless. You move through them, they leave no trace on you.
The mobile and unencumbered ways of living that a ‘creative’ middle-class in the West has come to take for granted are now, of course, under threat. From, on the one hand, the twinned rise of global terror networks and isolationist nationalism and, on the other, a growing awareness that the adoption of ‘supermodern’ lifestyles is catalysing the unfolding ecological catastrophe. And so the character of airports has since 1992, when Augé coined the term ‘non-place’, shifted in the popular imagination. Spaces he identified as expressly ‘non-symbolic’ are now associated with atmospheric damage, with the detention of threatened asylum seek- ers at facilities like the notorious Colnbrook Immigration Removal Centre near Heathrow and with the US government’s secret programme of extraordinary rendition for the purposes of torture.
Which is to say that buildings designed to leave no mark are now symbolic of violence. This finds formal expression, in Polly Brown’s new suite of framed prints, in the damage done to photographic film by its pas- sage through airports. The artist here uses film scarred (and thus rendered commercially useless) by airport x-ray machines, the electromagnetic radiation from which creates the ghostly patterns that wobble across these prints. Onto this damaged material the artist has exposed images taken – illicitly – in airports, which testify on the most part to the constructed fantasy of their impersonality, the increasingly difficult-to-sustain illusion that these transient places exist outside of history and in a world without borders. The scratches that are scattered like iron filings across the prints attest to the scanning process, and again these blemishes are foregrounded rather than cleaned up. Each of these transfers from one medium to another – or from one state to another, to extend the analogy to international travel – leaves its mark.
It is their combination of banality and violence – as images in the first case, and objects in the second – that renders these works so unsettling. And yet in these scenes there are hints at a redeeming human drama: in the existential isolation of a figure at the end of a corridor; in the glimmer of a bronze sculpture’s breasts, polished to a shine by the hands of superstitious (or mischievous) passengers; in a ghostly self-portrait of the artist in a windowpane, merged with the plane behind. And in the slides that complement these framed prints are hints at the shifting symbolism of airports: as heralding an anodyne future populated by travelling sales- men moving around identical hotels; as first step towards the utopia envisaged by architects like Constant Nieuwenhuys, a worldwide labyrinth through which homo ludens could drift in search of pleasure; and now as places infused with threat.
It is a curious irony that a space in which the taking of photographs by civilians is forbidden is also the space in which those civilians are most comprehensively imaged: by thousands of closed circuit television cam- eras, by full-body scanners at the security gates, by the biometric screening and face recognition systems
at immigration. Photographs are instruments of control, which is why the state is so fond of them. They are also memories, and airports are places that we are supposed to forget. These photographs strike me as small acts of resistance. They remind us, in case we should forget, that airports mean something.