CLEAR protective plastic was draped over the delicate shapes of Nusret Pasic's Sarajevo Library History of the World. A few frames of a Laurel and Hardy movie were being used to test the video, screens for Atom Egoyan's images of the Armenian landscape. A young kid was using the speakers installed for an ambient music project to play his Smurfs tape. "Wet paint" signs competed for wall space with the stark beauty of Anna-Eva Bergman's paintings. Walking last week around the Irish Museum of Modem Art while the Event Horizon exhibition was being assembled, it was hard not to think how appropriate it would be to leave it in this chaotic, unfinished state, to retain the temporary, uncertain air of the day before opening. For the exhibition itself is an attempt to explore the lack of fixity and, certainty in contemporary European culture.
Its curator Michael Tarantino an Irish Italian American from Jersey City living in Brussels for the last nine years, might almost be an exhibit himself, embodying as he does the complexity of national identity that was one of the starting points for the show. He began to think about the exhibition in the context of Ireland's presidency of the EU, and the questions of European cultural identity that gather around it. .But, as he says, "that very quickly led to the question of what does it mean to be European?"
The exhibition is more concerned to ask that question than to answer it, and many of the pieces suggest by their very presence that European culture is itself a problematic concept. The work of the Sarajevan artist Nusret Pasic, made in a city under siege and using images of burned books, is a striking corrective to any easy assumptions about European civilisation. Another of the artists, Atom Egoyan was born in Cairo to Armenian parents, and has lived most of his life in Toronto. Sigalit Landau (who has taken ideas of transience to their logical conclusion and displays her work in a container ar the entrance to the museum) is Israeli. I think it's obvious from those choices," says Tarantino, "that I didn't want to do a European show in any simple sense".
Instead, the Event Horizon the title comes from a text by the Italian film director Antonioni, whom Tarantino cites as a strong influence on the show links the idea of cultural identity with more fundamental questions. "When I first started talking, to the museum about this project about 18 months ago, the three themes that very quickly, came to the forefront, were identity, land scape and narrative which I saw as being inextricably linked. One of the ways that people define themselves is through landscape, and, the other is through the stories that they tell. So for me, one of the major influences in determining the direction of the show was Antonioni, because those three issues are consistently explored in his films.
This connection with film is, for Tarantino, another aspect of the cultural uncertainty that the exhibition sets out to explore. Once we ask the question of what it means, to be European, another question that comes along very quickly is the break down of artistic categories." Not just cultural identity but culture itself is becoming increasingly open ended.
This, too, is reflected in the deliberate choice of different artistic forms in the exhibition. One of the projects in the show, by Colin Newman and Malka Spigel, is purely musical. Another, by the young British artist Sam TaylorWood, uses sound and photography. In the second part of the exhibition, which will, open in late November, there will even be a project by a French chef, examining, according to Tarantino, "the bay that you can construct a narrative with food.
Furthermore, one of fascinations of the show is the re-appearance as a visual artist of the writer and cartographer Tim Robinson, the maker of famous maps of Connemara, the Aran Islands and the Burren and author of the two brilliant Stones Aran books. Robinson has gone back to some three dimensional pieces made in the early 1970s when he was, as Timothy Drever, a visual artist and found in them "a suite of images that, has controlled n, subsequent writing and is implicit in my cartography". The conjunction of these pieces with written texts and the original artwork for the Connemara and Aran maps not only makes a powerful contribution to the exhibition's themes of narrative and landscape but also makes for a startling demonstration of Tarantino's contention about the breakdown of artistic categories.
The influence of film on the show is even more obvious Egoyan is better known as a filmmaker, and his piece is closely related to his movie Calendar while there is also a video installation by Marie Jose Burki. It is no great surprise to learn that Tarantino's academic studies were in film not painting. Such a back ground is not always appreciated in the art world. "I had a strange experience a few years ago," he recalls, "talking to a museum director in Germany about organising an exhibition there. And at one point he asked me where did you get your degree in art history?. I said I don't have a degree art history, I have a degree in film studies. And the conversation just crashed. He was horrified. But for me, just on a practical level, this breaking down "of artistic categories and hierarchies is very important."
A show that explores cultural uncertainties requires a certain degree of modesty in its curator, and Tarantino believes that he has constructed a coherent exhibition without imposing a static interpretation. "It's very structured in terms of the choice of particular works and particular artists, and of who's next to whom, but I don't mind if it creates conditions in which people who come to see the show can interpret things in a different way. I wanted to use that idea of different approaches to these themes, and try to make an exhibition that is as open as possible in terms of the relationship between the different works."
At a time when the curator often seems more important than the artist, not all of Tarantino's contemporaries share this relatively reticent attitude to their work. "Obviously, there's a lot of my thinking in the exhibition," he says, "but I don't agree with the concept that you go into an exhibition and you think more about the curator than you do about the art works. There are a number of curators who are of a startrip. I don't think that's right. Working with an artist, I approach it in a spirit of collaboration, and obviously you choose artists to work with that you know will at least enter, in to that, spirit. There are certain works in this exhibition where to start with I wasn't completely satisfied, and then I would talk it over with the artist. In some cases they made adjustments, in some cases not. But ultimately the final decision is the artist's."
