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Darren Almond at parasol Unit
Art in America, May, 2008 by Jane Neal
"Fire Under Snow," British artist Darren Almond's most extensive exhibition in the UK, comprised two films (one of which, Bearing, 2007, received its world premiere), a series of large-scale black-and-white photographs and a wall sculpture, Tide (2008), the newest work in the ensemble. The show took its title from the memoir of Palden Gyatso, Fire Under the Snow: Testimony of a Tibetan Prisoner, which details the author's 33 years of suffering at the hands of the Chinese in prisons and labor camps. With that choice, Almond set a strong political premise for his exhibition. Though quite different, the four works all address the consequences of tyranny and exploitation for people and the natural environment.
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The first work in the show, Tide, features 600 clocks. They look identical, but one is the "master" clock, the remaining 599 being what Almond describes as "slave" clocks, controlled by and synched to the anonymous leader hidden somewhere among them in the imposing floor-to-ceiling installation. It is a chilling pronouncement on the fate of so many workers around the globe, laborers exemplified by the protagonist of Bearing, a 35-minute-long single-channel video that traces the perilous routines of workers in an Indonesian sulfur mine.
Almond tracks the progress of one miner down through billowing clouds of noxious gas to the crater, where the man unearths huge lumps of mineral with the most basic of tools before struggling back up under the weight of his load. Clearly suffering and hopelessly ill-equipped, with rags stuffed into his mouth to ward off fumes, the man works in a living hell. Yet disturbingly, this poisonous environment, with its cadmium yellow rock and diffuse lemony-green clouds, is arrestingly lovely. Almond uses the tension between the man's plight and the suggestiveness of the landscape to hold our attention, shifting between long shots of the mysterious surroundings and close-ups of the miner's straining face.
In the Between (2006, 14 minutes) is a three-screen, high-definition video shot by Almond in China and Tibet, the final work in a train trilogy series he launched in 1995. The central screen features the dimly lit Tibetan Buddhist monks softly chanting in the Samye monastery in Lhasa. It is flanked on both sides by footage of the world's highest railway, the Qinghai-Tibet train route. At times the noise of the train is so penetrating, it overwhelms the monks' singing, and the screeching of the train is accompanied by jolting flashes of daylight. Almond clearly intends the film to function as a metaphor for China's violent intrusion into peace-loving, defenseless Tibet.
The intensity of In the Between contrasts sharply with the bleak series of six black-and-white photographs, Night + Fog (2007). Again Almond purloins his title from a poignant source, this time Alain Resnais's film that documents the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz concentration camp. Almond's sharp-focus photographs of black, dead trees were taken in the forests that surround the nickel-mining towns of Norilsk and Monchegorsk in Siberia, where mining (by forced labor during the Stalinist period) has left a legacy of environmental devastation. Almond presents the skeletal trees accompanied by an enameled bronze plate engraved with the words "Fire Under Snow." The plate reminds us that the stark beauty of the Siberian views conceals the most toxic pollution. It also leads the visitor back to the exhibition's title and the explicit account of one man's torture that has become the symbol of a nation's suffering.
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