Image of the Road

This exhibition explores the phenomenology of a route known as the E40, which extends from Calais in France to Ridder in Kazakhstan. Conceived by the United Nations to facilitate communication of goods, cultures, people, ideas, beliefs and inventions, the E40 is a trans-continental, long-distance trade route uniting these ten nations and parts follow prehistoric ancient pathways and sections of the so-called silk routes. Image of the Road represents an ongoing research project by Kirwan and Pruciak, which began during the summer of 2013 when the artists embarked on a 17,000 kilometre return journey by motorcar with architect Jarek Karpik. Over 54 days they travelled through France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The resulting exhibition brings together several different elements including a four channel video installation, a single channel video, photographs, archival material and wall-based text work. By undertaking the performative act of making the journey, the artists explore the indeterminacy of space and the experience of movement along the route. For Kirwan and Pruciak, the E40 is both a concept and a complex physical and communal social space - a dynamic trans-national and multi-cultural web of connections and disconnections. Kirwan and Pruciak's methodology is analogous to Walter Benjamin's 'botanising the asphalt' and Jean Baudrillard's subsequent 'botanising' American culture, while also identifying the deadpan in the 'every day' in the manner of Ed Ruscha. Explorations of the phenomenology of motorised transport in the 'modern' age as examined by Proust, Benjamin and others suggest how the experience of travelling along a road 'at speed' can disorientate and unsettle perception and identity thereby inducing a liminal state of mind and being. This exhibition attempts to accentuate the sensorimotor dimensions of the performative process by making various shifts from geographic and scenic elements to the emotional and psychic space of the locations and situations encountered