Film Still from Sky Burial, Mat Collishaw
Screening and talk by Mat Collishaw
Friday 14th June 6-8pm
Screenings:
12 noon, 4pm and 8pm Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th June
Brunel Goods Shed, Stroud, GL5 3AP
Book online: Pay What You Can £6, £8, £10
Mat Collishaw presents Sky Burial, an immersive video installation and meditation on life, death and humanity set to Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem, which resonates with broader psychological and physical concerns in the contemporary world. Collishaw creates an ambiguous, dystopian atmosphere in which existing death rites from the East have been transposed to a Western environment. Located within an inner-city tower block, Sky Burial suggests that some form of catastrophe may have taken place, preventing normal Western burial procedures:
“I chose ‘sky burials’ as my starting point, a practice carried out in countries such as Tibet; where the ground is too hard to dig a grave and the altitude too high for trees to grow and burn on a pyre, forcing people to use what resources they have; native vultures, in the ‘burial’ of their dead. Sky Burial suggests that human relationships with nature are not altogether harmonious and that sublime meditations on death and dying in the form of a Requiem had become difficult for people dealing with death in a highly mechanical, post-industrial landscape.”
Death bed scenes are interwoven with a vulture’s eye view footage of water; first a stream at its source, followed by ever widening rivers. From the introductory scene to an inner-city tower block, the incremental process of ageing - from young to mature to an inevitable dissipation into the ether - is mirrored in the river flowing to the sea.
Mat Collishaw is a key figure in the important generation of British artists who emerged from Goldsmiths’ College in the late 1980s. He participated in Freeze (1988) and since his first solo exhibition in 1990 has exhibited widely internationally.
Quotes:
"A massively moving, profound experience, and a true melding of the heard and the seen."Colin Clarke, Seen and Heard International
"The film is a work of baroque sensibility, both shockingly beautiful and liberating, injecting Fauré’s masterpiece with a contemporary grittiness." Artmuse, London
"Fast tempos, contrasting colors (almost brutal percussions), the music propels itself in space like the scavenging camera which revolves around a huge disused tower, between rust and concrete. Inside, rooms for the dying, surrounded by a few relatives and oxygen bottles. The videographer's gaze will seek, in the hollow of each eyelid, the mystery of death which will soon close them. With each flight of soul, the flight over water filmed by drone, source, river then river. Finally, the open sea swells." Marie Aude Roux, Le Monde
“Sky Burial’s reflections on life and death are beautiful and moving... exquisite and austerely performed” Tim Ashley, The Guardian
"There are multiple voices at work here: Fauré’s vernacular, the Latin text of the Requiem Mass itself and the visual counterpoint of Collishaw’s film. The arc of the film is simple, but the ‘weaving’ of images is what gives the film its profundity." Colin Clarke, Seen and Heard International
