Jul 5-Sep 10, 2010-London-Leah Gordon-Photos from Haiti-Riflemaker Gallery
Posted: July 1st, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Exhibitions-Recommended, Haiti |(b. 1959 Ellesmere Port)
‘The Invisibles’
Monday 5 July - Saturday 10 September
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Download Leah Gordon biography
Leah Gordon (b.1959 Ellesmere Port) is a photographer, film-maker and curator who has an ongoing interest in and relationship with Haiti. She first visited Haiti in 1991 and was the official photographer for the 1994 Amnesty International Report on that country. She has exhibited widely, her images featuring in numerous public and private collections including that of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Gordon has been involved in a range of projects as both visual artist and curator, including documenting experiences of homophobia in London, crossing-dressing in Vodou, links between the Slave Trade and the River Thames and exhibitions of Haitian art. Her photography book ‘Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti’ is published in June 2010.
The cover image to the Riflemaker exhibition The Invisibles: ‘Girl with Bird’, Cité Soleil, Haiti 1993, documents a territory - Cité de Soleil - classified by the UN as the most dangerous place on earth, though the image is a portrait of stillness and grace, taken during the military coup years of 1991-1994.
Gordon has recently returned to Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake. Her upcoming exhibition and book ‘The Invisibles’ will include photographs sold to benefit victims of the disaster. In 2006 she commissioned the Grand Rue Sculptors from Haiti to make ‘Freedom Sculpture’, a permanent exhibit for the International Museum of Slavery in Liverpool. Continuing her relationship with the Grand Rue artists, Gordon organised and co-curated the Ghetto Biennale in December 2009. Gordon also teaches fact-based film at The University for Creative Arts, Surrey. She participated in the Riflemaker exhibition ‘Voo-doo’ in 2009
“I’m drawn to the boundaries between art, religion and anthropology. These borderlands have a historical, and often uncomfortable, relationship with photography. A suspicion that photography has observed and policed, but never taken part. Photography has rarely been embraced as a form of representation by religions. It is as if photography, with it’s indelible relationship to the material, could only serve to disprove the divine, Although when one reflects on its alchemical past it seems rooted in magical process.
Much of my studio photography is an exploration of this, often surreal, territory. My portraits in the studio are staged examinations of the spirit world; an anthropology of the invisibles. ‘Kanaval’ is a body of my work that has a more documentary approach. A record of people that still own and transmit their own folk history. It is a unsanitised, dirty history of the people played out on the streets”. Leah Gordon.
“People originated by magic in all countries of the world. No one lives of the flesh. Everyone lives of the spirit”: Andre Pierre, Haitian artist, quoted in ‘The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou’, ed. Don Cosentino, UCLA Fowler Museum.
“Leah Gordon’s images seem to speak not only to the eye and mind, but somewhere deeper. They almost speak to the soul itself, to the long buried core of our human experience. As we peek into this powerful world, we see mankind turned inside out; the monster within worn proudly on the flesh, exposed, named and challenged. I think I will return over and over again to these images - they are a startling reminder of what lies beneath. Truly startling. Truly brilliant”. Emma Rice
Emma Rice is the Artistic Director of the Kneehigh Theatre where she has directed shows including ‘Brief Encounter’, ‘A Matter of Life and Death’, ‘Cymbeline’, ‘Tristan & Yseult’ and ‘The Red Shoes’.
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