Etak

Past
Exhibitions

Etak

an
exhibition about locating and location

The
Puluwat islanders in the Pacific ocean use the principal of Etak when
travelling between islands. They do not use maps or think of distance
in miles nor do they imagine themselves as even moving while travelling.
Rather they use a highly abstract, complex and creative cognitive map
to travel from one point to another.

Using
Etak as inspiration four artists locate Elastic residence.

Nothing
to Declare
Rebecca Feiner explores
cycles of displacement through ethnicity, culture, religious and political
waves of immigration to the East End streets of London.

Cuboid
Jon Fawcett presents the first
complete work in his entities series; a large, non-physical object that
passes through the gallery.

Layers
of Ambivalence
Deej Fabyc performs a lecture about
mapping ambivalence and also performs a series of painted drawings based
on maps of Whitechapel
from the sixteenth century until the present.

East
End Aussie

East
End Aussie, Joanna Callaghan

Etak

28
October – 14 November 2004

Open
Saturday & Sunday 12-6

or
by appointment

079309
19075 exhibitions@elastic.org.uk

Joanna
Callaghan navigates geographical points that surround the gallery
via personal history and emotional indicators.
‘Since arriving in London in 1997 I have lived, loved and lost
within a one mile radius of this gallery. This is a map of how I came
to be here and the things that happened.’

more images from etak can be seen here

About
etak

Basic
directions in etak are defined by the places around the horizon where
particular stars rise. The navigator knows star courses between every
pair of islands in their own vicinity. This provides the basis for the
system of knowledge. However stars are not reliable sources of directional
information; they cannot be seen by day or on cloudy nights. When travelling
between one island and another, the navigator keeps in mind a third island,
the etak island to the side of the course. The voyage is imagined in terms
of the movement of the etak island, as if the canoe itself were stationary
while the etak island slid slowly backward along the horizon. Other information
is gathered from the relation between time and land/sea marks and between
land/sea marks and stars.

The etak principal is highly abstract – the reference island is
never in sight and the star positions under which it moves are rarely
visible either. Much of the relevant information comes from dead reckoning,
sea marks, wave patterns and birds however the navigator refers this information
to the imaginary movement of a remote island under the unmarked rising
positions of invisible stars.

I
am interested in the process of navigation (location) and how it forms
and informs the outcome (the located). I am interested in how cognitive
maps are created through information that originates from disparate sources
via contextual frameworks such as historical, personal, virtual, cultural
and political. I am interested in navigation and orientation as metaphor
for displacement and integration.

Joanna
Callaghan