Review | The Overland Project by Sara Haq
In these days of fast food, and instant success it is interesting that someone from a Western country should take the slow way from London to Thailand by train not plane.
Sara Haq’s The Overland Project captures the romance of train journeys from a bygone in an exquisite way. The exhibition is her first London solo show and is at the Alexia Goethe Gallery and runs till February 20th.
The challenge of taking artist photos as opposed to reportage is that the artist sees what is not there to the human eye, but can use the camera as a sensor to pick up mood and light. Sara Haq does that and challenges our ideas of travel and being an outsider looking through a lens at another culture.
My favourite’s were the hauntingly beautiful images that extract the warmth of a bitter cold Siberian landscape. Some of the images are captured from within the confines of a train carriage and are framed by the train window, always letting us know as the viewer that we are intruders or strangers in someone else’s Land.
The exhibition also contains two films. One taken through a train window filmed with a stills camera with the lens pressed up against the window. The other of a Chinese worker chanting a traditional song, working himself into a trance like a demonic dervish.This is shot in portrait and Sara bravely subverts the normal cinematic format of shooting in landscape. Both these films capture moments rarely seen by an outsider, so intimate and painful to watch, yet at the same time one is not able to look away.
The Overland Project is an audacious adventure both as an experience and as exhibition.
– Campbell X –
blackmanvision.com | @CampellX on twitter
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