Film Still from Sky Burial, Mat Collishaw
Special opening Immersive audio-visual installation and talk by Mat Collishaw
You can experience Sky Burial at the Goods Shed and hear Mat Collishaw talk about the work on Friday 14th June 6-8pm - SOLD OUT.
Immersive audio-visual installation:
Time slots: Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th June 12 noon, 4pm and 8pm
Brunel Goods Shed, Stroud, GL5 3AP
Mat Collishaw presents Sky Burial, an immersive video installation and meditation on life, death and humanity set to Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem, which resonates with broader psychological and physical concerns in the contemporary world. Collishaw creates an ambiguous, dystopian atmosphere in which existing death rites from the East have been transposed to a Western environment. Located within an inner-city tower block, Sky Burial suggests that some form of catastrophe may have taken place, preventing normal Western burial procedures:
“I chose ‘sky burials’ as my starting point, a practice carried out in countries such as Tibet; where the ground is too hard to dig a grave and the altitude too high for trees to grow and burn on a pyre, forcing people to use what resources they have; native vultures, in the ‘burial’ of their dead. Sky Burial suggests that human relationships with nature are not altogether harmonious and that sublime meditations on death and dying in the form of a Requiem had become difficult for people dealing with death in a highly mechanical, post-industrial landscape.”
Death bed scenes are interwoven with a vulture’s eye view footage of water; first a stream at its source, followed by ever widening rivers. From the introductory scene to an inner-city tower block, the incremental process of ageing - from young to mature to an inevitable dissipation into the ether - is mirrored in the river flowing to the sea.
Mat Collishaw is a key figure in the important generation of British artists who emerged from Goldsmiths’ College in the late 1980s. He participated in Freeze (1988) and since his first solo exhibition in 1990 has exhibited widely internationally.
Fauré’s Requiem was recorded at the premiere performance of Sky Burial at London’s Barbican Centre on November 20, 2023. The performances by The Insula Orchestra and Ascentus chorus, conducted by Laurence Equilbey, were captured and have been spatially mixed for d&b Audio Soundscape by Loss Gain at Rattle & Brash, Stroud.
This event is supported by Darbyshire Ltd and d&b audiotechnik.
Quotes:
"A massively moving, profound experience, and a true melding of the heard and the seen."Colin Clarke, Seen and Heard International
"The film is a work of baroque sensibility, both shockingly beautiful and liberating, injecting Fauré’s masterpiece with a contemporary grittiness." Artmuse, London
"Fast tempos, contrasting colors (almost brutal percussions), the music propels itself in space like the scavenging camera which revolves around a huge disused tower, between rust and concrete. Inside, rooms for the dying, surrounded by a few relatives and oxygen bottles. The videographer's gaze will seek, in the hollow of each eyelid, the mystery of death which will soon close them. With each flight of soul, the flight over water filmed by drone, source, river then river. Finally, the open sea swells." Marie Aude Roux, Le Monde
“Sky Burial’s reflections on life and death are beautiful and moving... exquisite and austerely performed” Tim Ashley, The Guardian
"There are multiple voices at work here: Fauré’s vernacular, the Latin text of the Requiem Mass itself and the visual counterpoint of Collishaw’s film. The arc of the film is simple, but the ‘weaving’ of images is what gives the film its profundity." Colin Clarke, Seen and Heard International
Past performances:
Festspielhaus, Baden Baden, Germany. Music Aeterna. 2021
De Singel, Antwerp, Holland. Brussels Philharmonic. 2021
Zaryadye Concert Hall, Moscow, Russia. Music Aeterna. 2022
La Seine Musical, Paris, France. Insula Orchestra. 2023
Hong Kong Cultural Centre, Hong Kong, China. Insula Orchestra. 2023
MONA, Hobart, Tasmania. Tasmanian SO /Eivind Aadland. 2023
Kilden Performing Arts Centre, Kristiansand, Norway. Kristinsand SO /Eivind Aadland. 2023
Opéra de Rouen Haute-Normandie – Théâtre des Arts, France/Insula Orchestra. 2023
Barbican Centre, London, UK/Insula Orchestra. 2023