Belfast Exposed

Exhibitions

5th Oct - 28th Oct

No Surrender: The Protestants

Belfast Exposed is thrilled to be exhibiting No Surrender: The Protestants, a body of archival work by internationally renown...

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5th Oct - 28th Oct

Not Surrendering

Belfast Exposed presents ‘Not Surrendering’ by Mariusz Śmiejek, an exhibition of images taken from Śmiejek’s forthcom...

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Community

21st May - 22nd May

Showing the faces of dementia with Alzheimer’s NI

Ahead of the Alzheimer’s Society Annual Conference 2019 (ASAC19), Belfast Exposed was commissioned by Alzheimer’s NI to w...

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4th May - 20th May

Coronation Generation 2023

Bringing together young people from across communities for Coronation GenerationIn April 2023, Belfast Exposed worked wit...

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The Zone

Gallery 1

31st Oct 2002 to 13th Dec 2002

About The Exhibition

In 2001 David Bate made a series of photographs in and around the medieval city of Tallinn in Estonia, situated on the former Soviet Union's East/West border. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Estonia gained independence in 1991 and began the transition from communism to market economy, a transformation of social and political, as well as economic structures. This transition has been fraught with problems; the collapse of the middle classes, the growth of mafia capitalism and the fragility of a democracy with meaningful freedoms which has seen the rigorous control of independent media. Tallinn, now open to tourism, trade and foreign capital investment, is a city, with a troubled past, standing at the threshold of a future promising the uncertainties of progress.

David Bate's photographic series Zone draws influence from Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker (1979) also shot in Tallinn. The film tells a story of 2 men being led by 'the stalker', a guide, through a contaminated wasteland or zone controlled by an alien intelligence. It is believed that within the 'zone' exists a room in which the desires, conscious or unconscious, of all who enter are granted. When the men reach the threshold of the zone, they grow fearful of what the fulfilment of their desires might mean, they decide not to enter and return home.

Bate reads the 'zone' as a metaphor for Western consumer culture, he observes its effects on the city and citizens of Tallinn, how it reshapes space and how 'desire must be negotiated across alien rules'. The work is subtle; it operates both as a metaphorical description and as personal memories of an unfamiliar place. In a review of the work, Katrin Kivimaa suggests that despite homogenising global processes; 'there still remains an unbridgeable gap between the people for whom the clock with Lenin's image on it is a souvenir and those for whom it was a reality'.

Belfast Exposed showed th Zone as part of an ongoing series of exhibitions presenting contemporary art-documentary representations of public space in cities currently undergoing rapid development and dramatic change.

This exhibition is supported by Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea.

The Artists

David Bate