Steve McQueen’s video installation ‘Ashes’ is coming to the ICA
This is the U.S. debut for the piece, created by the director of '12 Years a Slave.'
British artist Steve McQueen, known for directing 12 Years a Slave, is bringing one of his video installations to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston for its stateside debut.
The ICA announced Wednesday that it had acquired Ashes, which chronicles when McQueen met a young fisherman named Ashes in Grenada while filming another work.
Ashes was a standout at the 2015 Venice Biennale international art exhibition. It will be on view at the ICA from February 15 through July 9, 2017.
“Ashes expands on McQueen’s subjects of the political body, and the ways in which bodies can be confined and defined by history, labor, and the legacies of colonialism and globalism,” said Dan Byers, Mannion Family senior curator at the ICA, in a press release.
Shot on Super 8 film by cinematographer Robby Müller, one screen of the installation shows Ashes balancing on the prow of a boat in the Caribbean. The boat bobs with the waves, and Ashes is surrounded by open sky and sea.
This contrasts with the second screen of the installation, which was filmed eight years later after Ashes’s death. This video shows the creation of his gravestone along with the digging of his grave. According to the release, “This footage provides the soundtrack to both projections, a precise, visceral soundscape of fabrication and digging overlaid by Ashes’ friend narrating his fate.”
McQueen said in the release: “Life and death have always lived side by side, in every aspect of life. We live with ghosts in our everyday.”
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