Airport, 2015
'Airport', Exhibition View, 2015, St. James Hatcham Gallery, London, 8 Ch Video, 4 Ch Sound, Looped. Photo Credits: Mantas Grigaitis
'Airport', Exhibition View, 2015, St. James Hatcham Gallery, London, 8 Ch Video, 4 Ch Sound, Looped. Photo Credits: Mantas Grigaitis
'Airport', Exhibition View, 2015, St. James Hatcham Gallery, London, 8 Ch Video, 4 Ch Sound, Looped. Video Credits: Mantas Grigaits.
“Airport” is a site-specific 8-channel audiovisual installation that aims to connect two sites: the St James Hatcham gallery in New Cross, London and an airfield located in Nida, Lithuania. Nida airport was built by the soviets during the USSR occupation. It was abandoned during the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, the human-built construction has been resting quietly like a grey coffin waiting to be unearthed. In a way, the small aerodrome has transformed itself into a post-soviet cement sculpture, hidden behind the wilderness of the surrounding natural habitat: the forest, the lagoon, the dunes and the Baltic sea. Whilst not immediately visible or detectible, the airport continues to linger and converse, this way reminding us of a history that has been silenced for decades.
“Airport” plays with the idea of connecting space and time. It transports the disused airfield site, located thousands of kilometres away, into the architectures of St. James Hatcham, a contemporary gallery space in London. Using a row of 8 video monitors and a 4-channel sound setup, the artwork presents the audiovisual landscape of the site with intermittent auditory extracts of women singing old Lithuanian folk songs, which periodically emit from television monitors. The aim of the artwork is to transport the auditory and the visual ambience of the physically distant landscape surrounding the airstrip into an enclosed gallery setting, this way forming a temporal and spatial conversation between the gallery and Nida. The artwork uses footage from the airport, the surrounding forest and the soundscape of Nida Airport as ways of inviting the St. James Hatcham gallery visitors to transport themselves into the projected audiovisual setting.