Edgar Martins: Publications
Edgar Martins is currently exhibiting his new poject Siloquies and Soliloquies on death, life and other interludes at Open Eye Gallery as part of Flat Death. We have a number of publications from Martin’s available in our gallery shop.
00:00.00 – £47.00
Launched in 2015, this project resulted from an unprecedented, 18-month long artistic collaboration with the BMW Group and surveys the fabrication, tooling and assembly of the modern era automobile vehicle. The project focuses solely on BMW’s plant and R&D centres in and around Munich (Germany). However, these images also look beyond the mere referent, representing therefore a point of resistance.
The Diminishing Present – £40.00
The Diminishing Present was shot almost exclusively in Martins’ hometown of Bedford, UK. Inspired by Salman Rushdie’s reflections on the film ‘The Wizard of OZ’, The Diminishing Present explores the concept of ‘home’. Widely acclaimed, The Diminishing Present is presented in three inter-related segments and one final, independent chapter.
The premise for this work stemmed from Rushdie’s closing observations in the book The Wizard of Oz (BFI Film Classics): ‘Its not that there is no place like home, there is no longer any such thing as “home”’.
Produced almost entirely within a 3km radius of Martins’ home and studio, The Diminishing Present is a journey of recognition: the city and, in a broader sense, home, as our object of understanding is changing and because of this one needs to find a new critical language that supports it, and a new system of knowledge from which to derive our glossary of life.
The Rehearsal of Space and The Poetic Impossibility to Manage the Infinite – £47.00
In 2012, Edgar Martins was granted unparalleled access to The European Space Agency (ESA) and its partners’ programs, including the human spaceflight, lunar and Mars exploration programs. Over the past two years, he has travelled to 20 locations across the UK, The Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain, Russia, Kazakhstan and French Guiana to shoot in classified facilities such as test centres, robotics departments, space simulators, laboratories, launch sites and platforms, astronaut training centres and satellite assembly rooms.
The photographs were shot using long exposures (up to one hour) and a 10×8”, large format camera. Their clean composition and hyper-real sharpness contrast greatly with the veil of secrecy and enigma that usually shrouds space-related activity. Although rarely seen by the public, the technology and facilities in The Rehearsal of Space look strangely familiar, underlining popular culture’s influence in shaping our understanding of space exploration.
The Time Machine – £99.00
Shot between 2010 and 2011, The Time Machine is structured as a topographic survey of hydro-electricity generating plants in Martins’ native Portugal. Working closely with the EDP Foundation, Martins gained exclusive access to 22 power plants located across the country. Many of the power stations were built between the 1950’s and 1970’s, a time of hopeful prospects of rapid economic growth and social change. Their tacit raison-d’être was to fuel the country’s expansion and propel it into a prosperous future.
Forty years on, no more than half a dozen people, including specialists and cleaning and security staff, run places which, in some cases, were intended to house up to 250 workers just a few decades ago. These people and their families were intended to live in real villages, hubs of population and urban development in a future which, today, has ultimately emerged as uninhabited.
This is not a House – £40
The US sub-prime mortgage crisis, which has its roots in the closing years of the twentieth century, became apparent in 2007 and exposed pervasive weaknesses as well as deep-rooted inequalities within financial industry regulation and the global financial system. Shot in sixteen different locations, across eight separate states, this work catalyses and reunites fresh experiences of a new form of American architecture by summoning a disquieting conjunction of realism and fiction. In a study that goes beyond pure formal investigation and documentation Martins creates a poignant commentary on the financial ruin and bankruptcy that struck the lives of many thousands of people.