archaeography

This photomosaic depicts South Metope XXVII (c. 440 BCE) of the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, which is now located in Room 18 of the British Museum in London, United Kingdom. The marble, high-relief sculptural decoration depicts an image from the Centauromachy – the battle between the Lapiths and the Centaurs (Ovid Metamorphoses 12). The myth is a Classical juxtaposition of and conflict over concepts of civility and barbarism.

South Metope XXVII is part of the group of sculptural works known as the Elgin Marbles which were brought to London from Athens by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, between 1800-1810. The collection was vested in the Trustees of The British Museum in perpetuity in 1816. The ownership of these sculptures by the British Museum is currently contested by the modern Greek nation state.

The image is composed of a collage of 3,600 ‘cell-images’ resulting from unfiltered searches for the words 'Britain', 'Greece', 'ελλάδα', 'ελλάς' and 'βρετανία' through the Google ‘Image Search Engine’. Each corner focuses on the images resulting from each search as follows:

Upper Left - 'Britain'
Bottom Left - 'Greece'
Upper Right - 'ελλάδα' and 'ελλάς'
Bottom Right - 'βρετανία'

The corner-focus of the images from each search term is utilised to make overt the structures through which some people understand and communicate identities visually and the impact of digital culture on these expressions. Yet as the viewer moves away from each corner, the divisions between these concepts are blurred and the composite image becomes a conflation of both mythical battles between civilisations and modern conflicts over the ownership of antiquities, identities and the linguistic expression of those identities. Thus the partibility of the image seeks to blur boundaries between conceived nation states and social identities through permeable exchanges between the visual representations of self and other.

The viewer is invited to explore the ‘cell-images’ themselves and question their role within the composite whole – leading to questions of both the images’ and their own involvement in personal and national expressions of cultural identity and conflicts over images of civilisation.

For an online exhibition of the entire Reflexive Representations series, please follow this link.