Exhibitions
Events
On display
Paris Silenced: An Insider's View by Ian Borthwick
Ian Borthwick, Purely Academic, 2020.
Ian Borthwick, Untroubled Waters 1, 2020.
Ian Borthwick, Reduced to Silence, 2020.
Ian Borthwick, Cosmic Energy. 2020.
Ian Borthwick, Bridge of Sighs. 2020.
Friends
Past event
Great Hall, The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora
$15 [Friends Only Event]
Join us for a personal talk by photographer Ian Borthwick at his exhibition Paris Silenced, followed by morning tea at The Thirsty Peacock.
For one weekend in March (16 and 17), Christchurch will host an exhibition of photography that captures a unique moment in history – the Covid Lockdown which turned Paris into a ghost town.
In 2020, paralysed by the coronavirus, the world went into lockdown and Paris was no exception. As a journalist, Ian Borthwick had an official authorisation which enabled him to circulate freely in the city. One Saturday night, driving home after commentating a Six Nations Rugby game live on French radio, he approached the Arc de Triomphe just before midnight.
The immense Place Charles de Gaulle, the Avenue de la Grande Armée and the Champs-Elysées were totally empty – something which had perhaps never happened before, even during the German occupation of World War II.
Paris, the City of Light, the bustling, bubbling metropolis with some of the world’s most famous monuments, had become a ghost town.
So, protected by his media pass, Ian set out to record this unique event, visiting the classic monuments devoid of tourists, marvelling at the perfect reflections in the untroubled waters of the mighty Seine River, and braving arrest by gendarmes on the Champs-Elysées.
The result is this curated selection of the most evocative images.
About Ian Borthwick
Paris-based rugby journalist Ian Borthwick is also an award-winning photographer.
Born in Christchurch, educated at Christchurch Boys High School and Canterbury University, Borthwick majored in languages before completing a Masters of Arts (Hons) in French at Auckland University. Combining his passions for language and for the game of rugby, he fashioned a career as a pioneering bilingual journalist, broadcaster, and author, not to mention being for several years the official interpreter and first ever press officer appointed to the French National Rugby team.
For over three decades, totalling over 500 tests and 10 World Cups, he was considered the most widely-read journalist in world rugby, contributing to all the major French newspapers (Le Monde, Libération, Midi-Olympique) as well as all the major English-speaking titles across the globe (The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Independent, etc.). Writing in French that was often considered better than many native speakers, he won French Rugby Article of the Year in 1988, and French Sports Book of the Year in 2006. When he left his job of ‘grand reporter’ at renowned sports daily L’Équipe in 2012 he embarked briefly on a new venture as media manager at Paris club Racing 92 where, to use his own words, ‘The mediocre first-five from St Albans ended up teaching French to Dan Carter and Johnny Sexton.’
This exhibition is curated by DMC
And generously sponsored by Southern Eye Specialists.
DMC (Deborah McCormick Consulting) helps organisations, councils, government, businesses and individuals source, commission and curate significant works of art.
Deborah’s 25-year career has been dedicated to bringing fine art and sculpture to public places. DMC Art brings together opportunities and partnerships in Aotearoa New Zealand and abroad to deliver exceptional public art.
Related reading: Friends
Notes
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Notes
Underworld 2 by Tony de Lautour
This article first appeared as 'Painting offers a multiverse of symbols' in The Press on 21 June 2017.
Notes
Walk the Beat
Volunteer guide Rod McKay talks about his life, being an art tourist, and guiding Gallery tours.
Notes
The Art Whisperer
Christchurch Art Gallery volunteer guide Bella Boyd talks about her love of guiding, her favourite works in the Gallery collection and interpreting art with poetry.
Commentary
Mediating Reality
In the late 1980s, a significant shift for photography in Aotearoa New Zealand was identified in two art publications. The essays and images in these books showed how artists were utilising new strategies, breaking away from the prevailing documentary photography tradition that was, and still is, widespread in Aotearoa. Six Women Photographers (1986) was edited by artists Merylyn Tweedie and Rhondda Bosworth for Photoforum; and Imposing Narratives: Beyond the Documentary in Recent New Zealand Photography (1989) was the catalogue for an exhibition curated by Gregory Burke for City Gallery Wellington. The artists included in both publications questioned in various ways the assumptions and rules of image making, manipulating the media and making a political move from the standpoint of taking a photograph, to making one. No longer was a photograph considered a truthful representation of reality. Instead, photography was seen as a product of, and a participant in, current social and cultural values.
Commentary
Do You See?
With the death of Julie King late in 2018, art and art history in Aotearoa New Zealand lost one of its great champions and major scholars. Julie was born in Yorkshire and grew up and was educated in Alnwick, Northumberland; she moved to Christchurch in 1975 to take up a role lecturing in the newly formed art history department at the University of Canterbury. She retired three decades later, having pioneered the teaching of New Zealand art in Canterbury.
Collection
Julia Morison Dulia
In the early 1990s, Julia Morison used gold and shit in many works, exploring the idealised and base elements of human experience. She drew on the Jewish Sefiroth as a model for thinking about the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical. “Personally, I need to put some kind of order on experience for sake of sanity and negotiation,” she said. “The Sefirothic structure, or Tree of Knowledge, is really a metaphorical file and folder system for all; a conceptual paradigm for understanding everything. Putting that at the core of my practice gives me the freedom to admit everything and anything, micro and macro, metaphysical and corporeal, as legitimate content. It also gives me an interface to compose works.”
The title of this work, Dulia, is a Catholic term for worship given to saints and angels. Here Morison has pressed gold and excrement on to handmade paper balls, which are threaded together like the beads of a catholic rosary—an invitation to meditate on the relationship of the sacred and the profane, on a monumental scale.
