subscribe to our newsletterRuth Maclennan: Anarcadia
Set in the vast steppe of south eastern Kazakhstan, Anarcadia is a 35-minute video projection, which is accompanied by a series of photographs, After Life, shown for the first time at Ffotogallery. The exhibition also includes archive material from Kazakhstan, gathered by the artist.
Landscape and the traces of past actions that lie within it are the focus of Anarcadia. Shot among the desert expanses of Kazakhstan, Maclennan introduces two iconic characters into this shifting, elemental landscape: an archaeologist and a prospector; each of them methodically journeying across this apparently empty but symbolically charged terrain. Both protagonists project onto the desert their desires and experiences, seeking to uncover its buried meanings and future possibilities.
Their parallel journeys implicitly evoke the iconography of the American West. The remote, uncharted vistas seem to offer new scope for these enduring myths to be re-enacted. Highlighting the two characters’ different and competing incentives for being there, Maclennan’s layered, often contradictory stories echo the fundamental indeterminacy of the desert landscape. Unreliable, unpredictable, even treacherous, it is still a beguiling, open-ended canvas for human hopes and dreams.
Maclennan’s new photographic works, After Life, cast a forensic gaze on a liquid surface. Deceptive in both scale and subject, they allow associations to cling to the surface and the eye to explore the material that emerges.
Anarcadia was co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, in association with Ffotogallery and Stills, Edinburgh. Presented in association with Castlefield Gallery, Manchester. Funded by Arts Council England, with the generous support of the British Council. Additional support from the Henry Moore Foundation.