Bridget Baker

Current Review(s)

Wrecking at Private Siding 661

Bridget Baker at CHRISTIAN FERREIRA at the Wapping Project

The site of 'Wrecking at Private Siding 661' at Wapping is the point at which colonial history and Bridget Baker’s personal narrative intertwine. Now based in London, Baker was born in East London from a line of British settlers. These early narratives are transposed to the site at Wapping, East London, in the UK, where a large and peculiar object – a human transporter (a 19th century woven vessel) – has been recreated. The human transporter is installed in a distinct red brick hydraulic power station, which, due to its proximity to the Thames, powered a great part of London at the turn of the 19th century. Its heyday coincides with that of English settlement in South Africa, and the arrival of Baker’s ancestors in the Eastern Cape.

As you approach the space, your entry is shaped by a shattered bricked wall entrance, a construction which nods to the shattered wall framing the supine nude in Duchamp’s posthumously-built work Étant donnés (Given: 1 The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) (1946-66). However in Baker’s work the viewer is invited to enter into the space, in contrast to the cool, distanced, voyeuristic gaze encouraged by Duchamp’s peephole. Although the human transporter sits quite comfortably in time within the accumulator tower, clues to its recent reconstruction are revealed in one anachronism: Looking up, one sees a shattered white Perspex ceiling, as if the transporter has crashed through. Descending from the top of the accumulator tower and through the ruptured ceiling, the woven object materialises a passage through time and space.

29 September 2011 - 11 February 2012

Listings(s)

'Wrecking at Private Siding 661'

Bridget Baker at CHRISTIAN FERREIRA at the Wapping Project

This site-specific installation sees Baker working with personal and historical elements relating to the immigration of British settlers to East London, South Africa. The work acknowledges the silent evidence of the many ships that were wrecked along its coast, as well as evidence of the demise of her father and grandfather's work in the wool and hide industry in that town. Baker looks at various aspects of reconciling misplaced history, in particular the 'invisibilising' status of the returning immigrant, by considering human remains rescued from a wreck at the bottom of the ocean, and the instruction of returning them to the original place of rest, wherever that may be.

Amongst the salvage, Baker presents a cane-woven human transporter or landing basket, a notable object used during the late 1800s through to the 1930s to hoist immigrants, migrants and tourists safely to and from ships anchored at sea before the development of the Buffalo River Harbour. Referencing ideas concerned with enforced agency in the movement and displacement of people as artefacts of the Colonial African Project, Baker considers the piece as if a recently discovered museum diorama that is in ruin. The basket, having crashed to the bottom of an accumulator tower of a disused power station on the River Thames, is bereft of meaning, left silent and dumb in an unnamed museum.

Working with micro-narratives and the tension of the believable by replicating original objects, testimonials and blueprints, the work validates events omitted from maritime, colonial settler, and immigrant history books as well as mainstream media. Baker's working process is defined by an interdisciplinary approach and relational research. She assembles her findings, working with family inventories and established archives, to develop complex visual fragments that become re-enactments of possible narratives within contemporary history.

29 September 2011 - 11 February 2012

'Mine'

Berni Searle, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Gregg Smith, Johan Thom, Robin Rhode, Bridget Baker, Various Artists, William Kentridge and Nandipha Mntambo at Dubai Community Theatre and Arts Centre

The first exhibition of contemporary South African art in the UAE, 'Mine' is curated by South African artist, photographer and curator Abrie Fourie, who explains the concept behind the exhibition: 'The title refers not only to the idea of deep level mining, but to the concept of personal ownership. The works featured have been chosen for their diversity, with the common denominator that the artists make reference to themselves in their work, either in person, as actor, model, observer, interviewer or instigator. Mine seeks to explore the myriad ways in which we identify and position our "selves".'

Artists featured in this video exhibition include: Berni Searle, Bridget Baker, Cedric Nunn, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Donna Kukama, Doris Bloom, Dorothee Kreutzfelt, Gregg Smith, Jaques Coetzer, Johan Thom, Lerato Shadi, Michael McCarry, Minette Vari, Nandipha Mntambo, Penny Siopis, Robin Rhode, Simon Gush, Teboho Edkins, William Kentridge, Zanele Muholi

18 January 2012 - 06 February 2012