Aura & Time’s Strange Tissue

Auckland festival

of Photography 2021

& UrbanScreens.TV Australia

Standing by the margin of the Ross Sea at Botany Bay, one of Earth’s most isolated places, one is confronted by physical isolation subservient to time’s isolating touch. In this place, ghosts of struggle and survival are ever-present. A winter of darkness marks one of the most desperate and prolonged ordeals of human endeavour, though eight men survived, the traces of Scott’s expedition remain caught in Zephyr’s frozen breath.

Using photographs captured by Len Gillman during a scientific expedition to Antarctica, artists Sue Jowsey (F4 Collective) and Andrew Denton collaborate with Gillman in the creation of a touring exhibition exploring physical and psychological isolation.

Aura | ˈɔːrə |

(plural auras or aurae | ˈɔːriː | )

1. the distinctive atmosphere or quality that seems to surround and be generated by a person, thing, or place: the ceremony retains an aura of mystery.

2. (in spiritualism and some forms of alternative medicine) a supposed emanation surrounding the body of a living creature and regarded as an essential part of the individual: emotional, mental, and spiritual levels form an energy field around the body known as the aura | muddy colours in the aura indicate negative emotions.

• any invisible emanation, especially an odour: there was a faint aura of disinfectant.

3. Medicine a warning sensation experienced before an attack of epilepsy or migraine.

ORIGIN

late Middle English (originally denoting a gentle breeze): via Latin from Greek, ‘breeze, breath’. Current senses date from the 18th century.

Antarctica is a place alive with what Walter Benjamin describes as aura, a “…strange tissue of space and time: unique appearance of distance, however near it may be.”
_{Benjamin, Walter. “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” Media and cultural studies: Key Works, 2nd edn, Blackwell, Malden (2009): 23.}

“To perceive aura is to absorb it into one’s own bodily state of being”
_{Böhme, Gernot. “Atmosphere as the fundamental concept of a new aesthetics.” Thesis eleven 36, no. 1 (1993): 117-118.}

This research is part of The Auckland Festival of Photography 2021 and will tour UTV Urban Screen Productions Australia, with the generous support of AUTV and AUT.