Joint work with Stephen Partridge First Exhibited in Fuoriluogo 15 – Una Regressione Motivata, Limiti Inchiusi Arte Contemporanea, Campobasso, Molise, Italy. December 18 – January 23. Exhibition included work by Fausto Colavecchia (IT), Douglas Gordon (GB), and was curated by Deirdre MacKenna, formerly Director of Stills in Edinburgh and now Director of Cultural Documents. Subsequently exhibited in Dall’oggi al domani. 24 ore nell’arte, MACRO, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma 2016.

The first output from research into small region in southern Italy (Molise) and the notion of witness, memory and timelessness. A Hi-Definition Video installation that exploits the super-real photographic quality of the form. The work is shown on an LCD panel inset into a wall as though it is a scene through a window. The scene of rooftops and a church in the foreground appears to be still, but slight movements of distant cars, people and birds reveal that time is passing. Church bells may be heard at first in the distance and then nearer until the bells in the middle of the scene swing and peal. The work explores the slowly changing pace of life and the title refers to the time base and the pejorative term given to the ‘lazy’ south of Italy. The work’s motifs are Time, Memory and Identity. Each of the works in the exhibition addressed Time in one aspect or another, each suggesting routes travelling backwards through time and the possibility of a return, to re-view and re-experience in order to make meaning afresh. “Filmed in the town of Venafro, in Molise, Quattro Minuti di Mezzogiorno (2010, employs a fixed camera position which at first frustrates before revealing the very immediacy of its story. At the announcement of midday, the many church bells of Venafro compete in succession for almost 240 seconds and we realise that we can no longer trust technologies as there is in fact, no single moment of midday.” D MacKenna. This output led directly to further studies supported by an RSE Caledonian European Fellowship Sep- December 2013, and the exhibition Winterline, Castello Pandone, Museo Nazionale del Molise, Venafro, Molise, Italy, 2014-2015.

Filmed in the town of Venafro, in Molise, Quattro Minuti di Mezzogiorno (2010), a monitor-based video and sound installation by Stephen Partridge and Elaine Shemilt, employs a fixed camera position which at first frustrates before revealing the very immediacy of its story. At the announcement of midday, the many church bells of Venafro compete in succession for almost 240 seconds and we realise that we can no longer trust technologies as there is in fact, no single moment of midday. Partridge and Shemilt have collaborated for over ten years working with film, video, sound and installation, exploring and deconstructing systems of language in order to reveal their structures and suggest possibilities which may arise from them. The sound from Quattro Minuti di Mezzogiorno resonates throughout all the spaces within the gallery, pervading our reading of each work and the picture we construct as a whole, gently undermining the very measurement of Time and in doing so, the institutions that profess to announce it. – Deirdre MacKenna