CHRIS FREMANTLE

Ilana Halpern at The Fruitmarket. I love a good timeline, and Ilana’s are fab.

The collections of small mirroring/different pieces are stunning.

I was, without planning it, on the train over reading an article questioning the construction of life and not-life, the idea that everything is animated in the same way. Ilana’s works so often talk about places elsewhere that they visit only for a moment. The texts are written in Glasgow about remote places and times. The piece about sharing a birthday with Eldfell accepts the fundamental difference, we will share a birthday a few times, and then you will carry on and the timescale will change, human to geologic (if it ever was human).

The article’s subtitle is ‘when the rocks turn their backs on us’.

“Other forms of existence are assessing the humans just as the humans assess them.”

“On the one hand, subjective agency was so roundly defeated, by capitalism, by militarism, and on the other, the subjective agent of history started to fragment into different voices.”

“So why not take it as the real and ditch the subject that is supposed to correlate to it?”

Ilana’s subjectivity is very much in evidence in the work, but it’s temporality and temporaryness also tempers it. Yes we know Ilana and the stones and volcanoes are manifest to each other (whatever that means, and however in danger it is of evoking authenticity), but it is all about changes of state.

That being said, the going about of sharing your birthday with a volcano is a genius way to think about making kin. Eldfell is a distant sibling that Ilana really only meets up with very occasionally. It does avoid the coziness of locality.

Sorry you have to read the article to get the points about manifestation and locality.