COMA is looking forward to participating in the 2024 edition of Melbourne Art Fair, open from 22 – 25 February and taking place at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. The gallery can be found at booth K2.
The solo presentation will feature a new body of work by Australian artist Shan Turner-Carroll, titled, “SÚDA VÚDA AGGA BA” and focus on objects, gestures, scenarios and performances that look to communicate with ETs and other hidden beings.
Movements for bodies suspended: the visitors of Shan Turner-Carroll’s SÚDA VÚDA AGGA BA.
Words by Mark Rohtmaa-Jackson
Your perfect lover turns to you and whispers, ‘I don’t know where your body parts are; where they begin and end. Your body is unbounded. Your eyes are fire. Your skin is the snow settled around stone.’
Reaching for the mountains by Shan Turner-Carroll, from his series SÚDA VÚDA AGGA BA, is a colour photograph of, in the centre of the frame, a figure sitting atop a metal umpire’s chair. The figure is not smiling, but stares at us at ease, as if resting. They wear Nike sports shoes; shoes that suggest this is a pause in motion. The sleeves of their coat are excessively long, extending down to the floor then intertwined as if discarded, wound together but perhaps unwinding. The arms end in high-visibility orange working gloves, the same colour as the sports shoes. The matching colours of these extremities, the shoes and gloves, suggest these are part of a set, and although this would be a set from different forms of activity – work and leisure, both are designed for movement and action. In this photograph, the action here is paused, perhaps for us. Behind and beneath the figure are clear signs that this is taking place in a sports hall out of hours. A place of speed and motion, competition and play; here paused. It must be tiring to carry the weight of such long arms as you go about your day. Such an adaptation must have an urgent function. Or perhaps the normal rules don’t apply here, in this other place.
Seyðisfjörður is a small town on a fjord encircled by mountains giving way to a crack of sea. There is a single road connecting the town to the rest of Iceland, and it can feel like a place set apart from the world. This is where the photographs in SÚDA VÚDA AGGA BA were taken. None of the people in the photographs are from this town, they are all visitors here. But what does it mean to be a visitor? The Latin origins emphasise vision, a going-to-see. But a visitor is also a body kept in motion; unsettled. Someone on their way from somewhere and on their way somewhere else, like the snow in Seyðisfjörður that shifts and drips and pours down towards the sea. And we can read these images as visitors, moving in to be captured in this moment before moving off again into a world elsewhere. And there is another significance to these images as images from this place. They are clearly made with a material literacy, and, in an isolated town in which materials can be scarce, the materials in these photographs are all resources. Like those who wear them, they are in the condition of being between: materials on their way to or from use. Clothes, tools and people between acts; captured between moments of preparing and doing.
Shan and I talk about extraterrestrials, a fascination we share. Visitors to Earth from the sky. SÚDA VÚDA AGGA BA is a nonsensical phrase, but not meaningless. It comes out of his desire to communicate with beings that are elsewhere. Extraterrestrials are, for the most part, indifferent to body categorisations. The concerns of extraterrestrials is often with non-places of the skin to implant their wild technologies: the small of a neck, a patch or nook, a back or side of something, an area that it might take a moment for its owner to locate or find a name for, or an area located only by its proximity to something more divided: ‘Here, just below my ear.’ They exist between modern and premodern forms of knowledge. They aren’t concerned with how we use body parts, and their characteristics, as the basis for recognition, social value or potential behaviours. They breach boundaries and classifications. They are indifferent to ears or rocks, or a lung or glass, or the length of an arm or leg. They are indifferent to how we assign bodies and their parts social distinctions, territories of power or cultural clarity. They are ungovernably other and they know how the body goes astray. Like extraterrestrials, the figures in these photographs are strange, and perhaps this is because they are seeking to reach into strangeness. They are aware of their leaky skin, such an awareness as an extraterrestrial might have known.
The figures of these works are paused in the here and now, but in motion in the expanded view. They grow taller to reach further. They seek alternative channels: paranormal, ultranatural, other worlds folded into each other, perhaps to read the static of the waterfalls as interference from the edge of the universe. Shan has described the works in this series as ‘poems or prayers’, and prayers are particularly revealing here. Prayers serve a purpose; although paranormal, they are gestures in motion; they are put to work. Fusing themselves with the resources to hand, the figures of these photographs extend their extremities to find new ways of speaking. Their legs or arms are long enough to reach into the sky and communicate in other forms. They communicate with the unseeable; the not yet. And there are always responses in Seyðisfjörður: messages from the mountains; or from an other world; or from the dead; or from the Huldufólk, Iceland’s hidden people. The wind can be loud here. The ice cracks as you walk. Some nights there is fire in the sky.
Let us not deny the paranormal. It is a leaky skin. It is movement to an elsewhere. It is an imagining of being able to cross incomprehensible distances; but also of things set in motion right here, alongside us, but hidden; or of voices from whatever comes after the threshold. Regardless of whether or not they exist, these worlds may be speaking back to us. They may be telling us something urgent.
