Fragments For A City In Ruins - Sara Rees

Sun 9 – Sun 16, 11am – 4pm
Preview Sun 9, 2pm
Mon 10 – closed

Disability Access: No
Family friendly: No

Echoing the visits to the ancient ruins of Athens in the Eighteenth Century by the elite on their ‘Grand Tour’, Fragments For A City In Ruins imagines a visitor from the future, wandering through the city, its ruins, both ancient and modern.

Post-apocalyptic and elegiac, poetic and political, Rees’ film responds to the geopolitical context of Athens, in relation to the seismic events of the continuing global financial and refugee crises. Ruins, as “unstable sites of temporal fluctuation in which past, present and future coexist”, provide a trope through which notions of history and empire can be excavated in relation to spatial politics. Thus, the work invites reflection on the construction of historical narrative with regard to contemporary discourses of power and, through its exploration of the city of Athens, the entwined histories of democracy and financialization, debt and dispossession, empire and ruins.