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Rose McLaren

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.



Articles Available Online


Talk Into My Bullet Hole

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July 2015

Rose McLaren

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July 2015

‘Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?’ ‘Oh, I don’t...

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May 2014

Art Does Not Know a Beyond: On Karl Ove Knausgaard

Rose McLaren

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May 2014

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has an oddly medieval form: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the...

Mitra Tabrizian’s Another Country (2010), a collection of nine large-scale photographs taken between 2009-2010, present to the viewer an uneasy vision of a location where space and time are indistinct, as are the subjects within it   Homi K Bhabha has noted that the individuals presented in these works are too distant from us to be the subjects of portraits, but too close to be part of the landscape Rather, they appear as figures in an affectless space – a space rendered such by its flatness, its clarity, by the clear light that cuts across it The signifiers that surround them are those of their everyday life (café, school, graveyard) but are ones in which they do not seem to participate: they are dis-placed within Tabrizian’s carefully choreographed scenes   This particular series of Tabrizian’s photographs involves ‘real people’ – immigrants who have come to Europe from the Middle East, and their children, some of whom were born in the UK They have been arranged in these scenes by Tabrizian, and they are therefore occupying their own places strangely The chosen locations are purposefully ambiguous, from the theme of the series we might assume that they are in Britain, an emblem of Tabrizian’s interest in cultural hybridity These people are both displaced in the strict territorial sense and displaced as subject to their memories, to a past in yet another country   These photographs seem to demonstrate the artifice of belonging to a place, and the extent of the social choreography at work in such situations even when there’s no camera present In a sense these people are called upon by Tabrizian to do what immigrants everywhere are supposed to do: to enact their place in this country, to become local by performance and repetition   We may begin to ask ourselves, how do we become local while remembering where we came from? How do we learn to make our place in these spaces that aren’t our own? Precisely by attending with great care to how we arrange ourselves within that space, and then representing that arrangement as natural Such blatantly choreographed street scenes make the enactment

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.

The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr

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Issue No. 6

Rose McLaren

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Issue No. 6

I have to recognise it’s cosmical; the shit is cosmical. It’s not just social, it’s not just ontological, it’s really huge. And that’s why we...
Stalker, Writer or Professor? Geoff Dyer's Zona and Genre

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February 2012

Rose McLaren

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February 2012

‘So what kind of a writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?’ wonders Geoff Dyer half way through Zona. Such...

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Interview

May 2015

Interview with Catherine Lacey

Will Chancellor

Interview

May 2015

Catherine Lacey is a writer who came to New York by way of Tupelo, Mississippi. She is a New...

Prize Entry

April 2015

The Incidental

Luke Melia

Prize Entry

April 2015

The automatic rifle fire was followed by an unnerving whistle at Ti’s ear. He gripped the shopping bags, grabbed...

Interview

May 2012

Interview with Jonathan Safran Foer

Jacques Testard

Interview

May 2012

Much has been written about the precocity and talent of Jonathan Safran Foer, whose debut novel Everything is Illuminated...

 

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