durn that road
annabel howland
20 januari 2019 - 16 februari 2019
Annabel Howland investigates the substantive connection between ecology, financial markets, and art. In an ongoing process, she studies structures and models found in both nature and society. From this research, she weaves a speculative web in her work. Looking through different lenses, she unravels the threads from each individual system, isolates them from one another, and then weaves them together into a new whole. The resulting works constantly shift in scale and perspective to fathom the complexity of systems or models.
The title ‘Durn that Road’ refers to a quote by the character Anse Bundren from William Faulkner’s novel ‘As I Lay Dying’ (1930). Anse is presented to the reader as someone who delivered a tirade against a road he finds threatening because it brings people to his front door (like a tax collector) and implicitly also stands for movement. “When He aims for something to be always a moving, He makes it longways, like a road or a horse or a wagon, but when He aims for something to stay put, He makes it up and down ways, like a tree or a man.”
For her multimedia installation at Bradwolff Projects, Howland takes a road on the island of Borneo as her starting point. The road runs straight through the tropical rainforest in the state of Sarawak (East Malaysia). Initially constructed along the coast by logging companies, the road was extended in 2010 to a number of villages near the border with Indonesia. One of the languages spoken by a minority in these villages is called Sa’ban. The expansion of the road coincidentally coincides with the publication of a trilingual Malay-Sa’ban-English picture dictionary written by Dr. Beatrice Clayre, who lived in this area around 1960. In 2016, Annabel Howland, together with anthropologist Alasdair Clayre—Dr. Clayre’s son—travels along this road and documents it on film. Accompanied by two Sa’ban men, they interview the inhabitants of the area about their lives, language, and customs.
Howland poses seemingly simple questions, such as how the arrival of the road has affected the local population and their language. The road, a line through the rainforest, connects communities that were previously separated by distances of days’ travel on foot or by boat, and this line itself connects other lines, lines crisscrossing the earth that run alongside a long stream of financial capital, resources, and religion.
‘Durn that road’ is built around these lines, strong verticals and horizontals, into which a singular perspective intermittently intrudes. The installation is composed of drawings, video, and audio, creating a spatial experience.
Annabel Howland (GB/NL) lives and works in Amsterdam. In 2018, she completed a long-term independent research project with a multimedia installation, ‘Producers-Parasites Hosts’, for VU Amsterdam (part of the GetLost art route). The first presentation within this ‘Producers-Parasites Hosts’ was the sound artwork ‘AGORA’ (Athens Biennale, 2013). This was followed by, among others, ‘Triangulations’ (Rode Loper Festival, Flevopark Amsterdam, 2017) and ‘At Altitude’ (Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, UK, 2018).