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Corinne Silva's 2009 film work âWandering Abroad' receives a second showing at Leeds Art Gallery when it forms part of a programme of commissioned work by the Gallery around the theme of journeys. âJourneys outâ¦Journeys', which runs from 13 March to 4 May, also includes Mariele Neudecker's âWinterreise' (A Winter's Journey), a film work commissioned by the Gallery as a co-production with Opera North in 2003.
Arranged as a series of slowly evolving panoramic scenes, Neudecker's film is a response to the early 19th century Romantic composer Franz Schubert's song cycle Winterreise, which set to music the poems of Wilhelm Müller. The songs tell of a spurned lover's winter wanderings, as he contemplates his lost love, abject misery and thoughts of death, set against the background of a snow-bound landscape. Searching for the images that were to form the basis of the films led Neudecker herself to make several journeys to various points at 60 degrees north during the winter of 2003.
The starting point for Silva's film Wandering Abroad is the life and death of David Oluwale, whose body was pulled out of the River Aire in 1969, and who had travelled to England from Nigeria in 1949 with dreams of studying to be an engineer. Arriving in Hull, he was sentenced as a stowaway to a short term in Armley Gaol, Leeds; 20 years later he was found drowned in the Aire, having being hounded by local police. The film, with a soundtrack of Caribbean, West African and British music from the period, traces Oluwale's final journey down the river, but also narrates a journey through the city, a journey through time, resonant with the march of change and transition brought about through the urban development common to many northern post-industrial cities, which often seems to provide little space for new communities to co-exist with the world of new business.
The programme, which runs continuously, is the first in a series that displays recent moving image acquisitions, several of them commissions, and many of them acquired through the Arts Council Lottery funded Special Collections scheme run by the Contemporary Art Society.
2010 is the centenary year of the Contemporary Art Society, the august charitable organisation that has had such an impact on the collecting of modern and contemporary art for Britain's metropolitan and regional galleries.
