Yael Bartana, Alex Frost, Laura Lancaster, Laurence Lane, Susan MacWilliam, Anthony Shapland, Clara Ursitti and Matt White

One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Emily Dickinson, Time and Eternity

"So everyone ends up here' You mean whether you were good or bad or whatever. All that stuff about going to hell if you’re bad... not true' Everyone’s here'"
From After Life, directed by Hirokazu Kore-Eda.

For Isaya, the angry young man in Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s 1998 film After Life, death brings the revelation that the road to Heaven or Hell is not quite as promised. Instead of the anticipated punishment or reward, he finds himself in limbo, a slightly shabby way station between life and death.

In a building reminiscent of a school or a social security office, angelic counsellors (themselves subject to the mundane trappings of corporate life including motivational meetings) help new arrivals to choose a single memory, which can be taken with them on their onward journey to eternity.

The counsellors not only influence, or indeed bring about change in, the choices of the dead – be they a sexual encounter or a trip to Disneyland – but they make the chosen memories visual by creating a film of them.

They do so both idealistically and pragmatically, doing their best to assemble the necessary props, glean story and setting from the flawed recollections of the dead and complete the work against a pressurised background of lack of time and limited resources.

After Life is a meditation on the pursuit of happiness and a film-maker’s affectionate tribute to the place that the messy and compromised business of cinema still occupies in our dreams and aspirations. Above all, however, it is an exploration on the nature and meaning of memory.

Memory, in Kore-Eda’s scenario, is interpretative. It can be shaped, manipulated and perhaps even actively fabricated. It is in the theatrical restaging of such memories – a process that is both collaborative and creative – rather than in some idea of dispassionate document
ation or the biased and sentimental nature of individual recollection, that the film’s protagonists find resolution.

It is this sense of restaging the momentary that forms the core of the exhibition ‘Afterlife’, a collaborative project curated by Hannah Firth of Chapter, Cardiff and Paul Stone, Laurence Ward and Christopher Yeats of Vane, Newcastle upon Tyne. The show brings together eight very different artworks, which coalesce loosely around themes of the moment and memory, truth and fiction, limbo and ambiguity.

Much of the work centres on processes of re-presentation, of collection, recollection or research. There are attempts to capture or stage a specific moment, often a moment of transition or transformation, or to visualise the unseen. These works draw not only on personal, individual experience but also on collective experience and the cultural, social and even political frameworks through which memory is mediated.

There is a pervasive atmosphere of melancholy in the works and in some cases threat. To immerse oneself in the field of memory, and to enter limbo, is also to admit to the presence of ghosts.

In Matt White’s video piece Past Lies, an ordinary man looks unblinkingly at the camera. Mumbling indistinctly, he identifies himself as James Smyth, the blankness of his tone matching the blankness of his expression. There is a voice in the background, a man asking questions. The voice belongs to a past-life regressive hypnotist and in response to his questions the man who calls himself Smyth is describing, in the present tense, the commission of a brutal rape and murder.

The details are not always distinct, the sound quality fluctuates, but the monotone presentation of the speaker does not. We hear the words "tight bodice" and the name "Esmé. The story that emerges is of a barmaid whom he has strangled, "because of her smile".

Is this a contemporary taped confession, or historical reconstruction' Is the murderer this man in front of us, or a figure from the past? Whom can we punish? Whom should we fear? Past Lies doesn’t offer us any explanation, just a range of possibilities. We are guided largely by conventions of presentation. The rough, immediate sound and talking head format is television shorthand for truth. In the video we see reflected our twin camera cultures of compulsory surveillance and voluntary confessional.

The confession, if that is what it is, is perplexing. Like that of the smiling murderer Moosbrugger in Robert Musil’s unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities. Whose pathological excesses were regarded as "finally something interesting for a change by thousands of people who deplore the sensationalism of the press... while these people of course sighed over such a monstrosity, they were nevertheless more deeply preoccupied with it than with their own life’s work." Smyth, like Moosbrugger, may be a collective cultural monster as much as a real individual.

Susan MacWilliam’s installation, After Image, is likewise concerned with murder and memory. Specifically with the nineteenth century Victorian belief that "the last image formed on the retina of the eye of a dying person remains imprinted on it, as on a daguerreotype plate".

The belief, which became known briefly as the science of optography, was a powerful collision of ancient superstition and radical new ideas on the eye. It fused the emerging art of photography, which was rapidly developing a new role in forensics, criminology and warfare, and ongoing medical research on optics in the great age of anatomy and dissection. In the hope of obtaining an incriminating image called an optogram, some corpses – including that of one of the victims of Jack the Ripper – had their eyes removed and examined during post mortem.

These pseudo-scientific methods were allied with broader phenomena that MacWilliam has also investigated in her art: ghost images, visions, spiritualism, hysteria and paranormal activity. Her interest has not been to prove or disprove such beliefs but to evoke them and to draw parallels between such historical visual phenomena and the processes of photography and video.

In After Image, MacWilliam constructs her narrative on the subject from disparate sources including contemporary publications and accounts, her own video footage as well as material from other genres such as Dario Argento’s 1971 film Four Flies on Grey Velvet. The video work is presented alongside a stereoscopic image of a disembodied eye. It is, we quickly recognise, a decorated ping-pong ball. We are always drawn back to the staging of the work, a reminder that we are never far from the black museum or the carnival freak-show.

A number of layers of sight and seeing are present in Anthony Shapland’s film Spectate, which investigates the penumbral state in which we receive information in the twilight of the theatre, the cinema and the lecture hall. Viewing Shapland’s work we sit in the dark of the gallery, watching a projected image. On film the camera rotates to reveal a cinema audience, in their seats, watching Kore-Eda’s film After Life. Although the gallery audience can’t see the screen, After Life is a film in which the characters watch a film. The work is a series of concentric circles: the play within the play within the play.

Rise, Shapland’s other work, shows a similar moment of transition, arrested and presented for the camera. It is lighting up time; a street lamp flickers into life and glows orange like a synthetic sun. The dawn chorus is heard in the background. Is this day or night?

Yael Bartana’s Trembling Time is an arresting moment that might be drawn from a disaster movie or science fiction. A busy four-lane highway of traffic slides to a halt. Motorists get out of their cars and stand silently on the street. What can they see that we can’t? Whose command do they obey? There is a distant sound of a siren. What kind of crisis are we witnessing?

Bartana’s extraordinary scene is in fact the enactment of memory made publicly manifest. It is Soldier’s Memorial Day in Tel Aviv and during the moment of remembrance, silence and stillness are observed. This kind of public ritual is one of the many mechanisms with which states ritualise traumatic loss through what the historian Philip Hobsbawm termed ‘invented traditions’. We are watching the moment in which memory becomes memorial.

Bartana’s position seems neutral, but distanced; we are looking down on the scene from a high viewpoint. We see both the mass and the individual. This is one of a series of works, featuring the Israeli national flag and anthem and the image of an individual female soldier, in which the public relationship with the military and the state is put up for possible renegotiation.

Clara Ursitti’s night walks have taken her into the Necropolis, Glasgow’s city of the dead and one of the most spectacular Victorian graveyards in the country. Ursitti has worked for some years with smell, a sense we know to be a key trigger of memory, investigating its roles from the erotic to the evocative. Here she takes on the role of hunter, tracking an unlikely herd of urban deer using only her sense of smell and the viewfinder of a night vision camera. Her work is presented alongside the dense smell of deer musk, a prized undertone in perfumery, used for its sexual connotations.

Ursitti’s actions are ambiguous. They echo the long British tradition of amateur naturalism. The moment when her light catches the eyes of a wary roe deer is a classic of TV nature programmes. Yet out in a graveyard at midnight, horror-movie conventions would suggest that the artist herself is more likely to be hunted than hunter; in tracking an animal she must become an animal, developing more acute hearing, night vision and animal instinct. There is an undeniably erotic undertone to the project; as well as quasi-rural scientist, Ursitti becomes urban voyeur.

Laurence Lane’s Untitled Walking Record is a tangible repository for memory. For a number of years the artist made sound recordings of every city he visited. Edited, they describe a coherent if geographically impossible journey that begins in the station in Kassel, Germany and travels through cities that include Rio and Venice and ends in Euston. Lane’s journey is true but entirely constructed, its skilful editing providing aural light and shade, its dynamics comparable to musical composition.

Walking has a long-established place in art history including the leisured stroll of the flâneur of nineteenth century Paris, to the Situationist detournement. In Lane’s work the walk is a means of establishing ownership. He captures the ambient sounds of the city and redistributes them to the audience.

Paradoxically, the comparatively old technology of vinyl may offer a more stable medium for this information than more recent formats whose longevity is as yet unproven. The black record is a physical container for Lane’s experience and the visual spectacle of the turntable a presentation in which the needle in the groove replicates the walking motion.

Alex Frost’s works, Untitled (Sophie #1) and The Modern Dance #4 are theatrically staged and apparently contradictory: A portrait drawn from a photograph and a minimalist sculpture set on a plinth. Both works are highly systematic. The sculpture is constructed by casting a series of cylindrical elements from the inside of a cardboard tube and joining each segment to form a closed knot. The process is not unlike a form of welding and the sculpture might be seen as a shrunken and emasculated version of the kind of ersatz heroic modernism that decorates public spaces.

The portrait, of an androgynous woman, uses the grid system of photorealist painting, but transcribes the photograph in a series of ritualised individual marks including circles, stars, crosses and diagonal lines which emulate embroidery. In both works the process of construction is highly visible and is some sense awkward or inadequate. In both, the machismo of late modern art is ‘feminised’ in a caricatured fashion by an association with craft and in particular the needlework of the knotted thread and the sampler. Both images are ambiguous: art historical moments re-staged, re-gendered and re-formed.

Laura Lancaster’s group of twelve paintings of found photographs, Untitled 2002-03, has become a randomly assembled narrative. In some of them we can trace individual events – a wedding, a seaside holiday – and perhaps even locations. But they are in a sense orphaned memories, entirely dislocated from source and context. In painting them Lancaster re-animates the images, the uniform photographic surfaces become textured, reflective, slippery. Contradictory timescales co-exist: the photographic moment and the painterly moment, alongside the unquantifiable age of the original images. In Lancaster’s hands transformations take place: a couple’s kiss becomes a wider melding of their forms, a child hugging a Disney character looks like she might be swallowed by an ominous monster. Lancaster’s actions are not straight-forward acts of rescue. In common with many of the works in ‘Afterlife’ they bring darkness to, as much as shed light on, their original source material.