Darren Almond: Fire Under Snow

preview 17 January 6 - 8 pm

Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art is pleased to present Fire Under Snow, a solo exhibition of recent works by the British artist, Darren Almond. This will be Almond’s most extensive exhibition in the UK to date and will include two recent films, a group of large black and white photographs and a new wall sculpture. These works will be on show in the UK for the first time.

Almond’s work examines the recurring themes of time, memory, human labour, exploitation and corruption. His works are rooted in his experience of travel to remote and diverse parts of the world. He deals with both private and collective human experience, resulting in work that is both analytical and emotional. In The Between (2006) is the central work in the exhibition, a fourteen-minute three-screen high definition film shot by Almond in China and Tibet. This is the final work in Almond’s train trilogy, following Schwebebahn (1995) and Geisterbahn (1999). In The Between was filmed on the world’s highest train route, reaching altitudes of up to 5,000 metres. The train, which travels from China to Tibet, embodies China’s political and cultural imperialism. To highlight this, Almond contrasts images of the train with footage of Tibetan Buddhist monks filmed in the Samye Monastery in Lhasa. As China does not acknowledge its neighbour as an ind ependent country, many of the passengers on the train are completely unaware of the political situation in Tibet.

The second film, Bearing (2007), a single screen projection, will have its world premiere at Parasol unit and depicts the daily routines of workers in an Indonesian sulphur mine. Under severe conditions, breathing polluted air, the workers transport very heavy loads of sulphur from the crater with only rags to cover their mouths.

Night & Fog (2007) consists of six large-scale black and white photographs of the dead forests surrounding the nickel-mining towns of Norilsk and Monchegorsk in Siberia. Again, Almond highlights the pollution caused by the exploitation of nickel mining, in this case the sulphurous smoke produced by smelting metal ores.

Tide (2008) the fourth work Almond has executed for the exhibition will be a new large-scale wall sculpture made of 600 digital clocks. Clocks are a recurring motif in Almond’s practice, causing the viewer to confront the unstoppable passage of time.

Accompanying the exhibition is a two part book, co-published by Parasol unit and Koenig Books and titled Darren Almond: Index, cataloguing Fire Under Snow in the first section, and providing a retrospective of Almond’s work to date in the second section.

Darren Almond was born in 1971 in Wigan, England, and graduated from the Winchester School of Art in 1993. He has had solo exhibitions at many institutions around the world, including Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2007); SITE Santa Fe (2007); Museum Folkswang, Essen (2006); K21, Dusseldorf (2005); Lentos Museum of Modern Art (2005); Herzliya Museum of Art (2003); Tate Britain (2001); Kunsthalle Zurich (2001); De Appel Centre, Amsterdam (2001); and The Renaissance Society, Chicago (1999). His work is held in collections worldwide including Tate, London; The Art Institute of Chicago; Kramlich Collection, San Francisco; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Fire Under Snow
Darren Almond