Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

This paper will present the pioneering methodology ‘site-integrity’ – a particular but original mode of site-specific practice that potentiates a dynamic exchange between site, artist, device and audience. The paper will centre specifically on ‘Assembly’ a series of site-specific installations that perform Muslim prayer spaces, comprising of 1:1 scaled moving floor projections with 5.1-surround sound. Made and exhibited in Brick Lane Mosque (2018 –19); Old Kent Road Mosque (2019–20); and Harrow Mosque (2020), the artworks captured worshippers from above, using a programmed device mounted on a motorised rig. Gliding back and forth on the rig, the device is in fact both “recorder” and “player”: at the end of a shoot, the camera is replaced by a projector and, with no need to process or edit, the “film” is ready for playback. This enables an exact transfer of scale and time as the image maps the architectural site as a kind of matching of the world with its representations or, rather, a bringing of the two into critical conjunction. Made in collaboration with the different mosque congregations, Assembly does more than reproduce prayer: it also “performs” the social and religious structures of the site. As the title of this research suggests site-integral films are informed, shaped and determined by the social, religious, architectural, geographical and institutional discourses present in site. The motorised rig is used as both a creature of autonomy and a source of possibility through which site materiality might be found and shared. Each installation functions as a self-making apparatus, in turn, making a broader argument about the triumph of lived space over representational space.