Above the Bay of Naples from Via Partenope, Naples, September 2008, 2012
tapestry (wool, cotton, silk, synthetic yarns), 5.00 x 9.50m
Courtesy the artist

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Slow Time and the Present, installation view at Kunsthalle Basel, 2012
© Kunsthalle Basel, 2012. photo: SERGE HASENBÖHLER

from left to right:
Via Carozza, Nola. June 2008, 2012, fresco (inkjet print, wood, plaster, aluminium, wax),  4.60 x 4.40m
Zoo, Oxford, January 1990, 2007, tapestry (wool, cotton, synthetic yarns), total dimension 3.90 x 12.00m
Above the Bay of Naples from Via Partenope, Naples, September 2008, 2012, tapestry (wool, cotton, silk, synthetic yarns), 5.00 x 9.50m
all: Courtesy the artist

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Slow Time and the Present, installation view at Kunsthalle Basel, 2012
© Kunsthalle Basel, 2012. photo: SERGE HASENBÖHLER

from left to right:
The Arciconfraternity of Santa Monica, Chiesa SS. Annunziata. Sorrento, April 2010, 2012, tapestry (wool, cotton, silk, synthetic yarns), 4.90 x 20.44m
Via Carozza, Nola. June 2008, 2012, fresco (inkjet print, wood, plaster, aluminium, wax), 4.60 x 4.40m
Above the Bay of Naples from Via Partenope, Naples, September 2008, 2012, tapestry (wool, cotton, silk, synthetic yarns), 5.00 x 9.50m
Broadway, 14th day, 18 minutes after dusk. New York, September 2001, 2012, tapestry (wool, cotton, silk, synthetic yarns), 5.00 x 8.75m
all: Courtesy the artist

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Broadway, 14th day, 18 minutes after dusk. New York, September 2001, 2012
tapestry (wool, cotton, silk, synthetic yarns), 5.00 x 8.75m
Courtesy the artist

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Slow Time and the Present, installation view at Kunsthalle Basel, 2012
© Kunsthalle Basel, 2012. photo: SERGE HASENBÖHLER

from left to right:
Above the Bay of Naples from Via Partenope, Naples, September 2008, 2012, tapestry (wool, cotton, silk, synthetic yarns), 5.00 x 9.50m
Broadway, 14th day, 18 minutes after dusk. New York, September 2001, 2012, tapestry (wool, cotton, silk, synthetic yarns), 5.00 x 8.75m
At 99 Posse concert. Via Gianturco, Naples. September 2008, 2012, fresco (inkjet print, wood, plaster, aluminium, wax), 4.60 x 4.40m
all: Courtesy the artist

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At 99 Posse concert. Via Gianturco, Naples. September 2008, 2012
fresco (inkjet print, wood, plaster, aluminium, wax), 4.60 x 4.40m
Courtesy the artist

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When CRAIGIE HORSFIELD made photographs in the mid 1990s, he tried to bring materiality into the surfaces, the skin, as he calls it. Each was big at a time when photographs weren’t big, each was vulnerable, a unique print, stressing their physical identity as handmade object.

Taking the concept of the photography as a very fluid one, HORSFIELD used several mediums like video, sound, drawing, performance and installation as instruments in the radical rethinking of notions of relation, of slow time and attention. Moreover, his concern is to care about his materials and his process, to literally take time, and in that sense to make the medium in which he worked matter.

Just like his other work, HORSFIELD‘s tapestries are always about the subject of time, relation and representation. The tapestries, the production of which extends over a long period, encompass a whole time span. But these tapestries also bring together past and present, being both a decorative medium that has a very long history and also the product of a highly technological process. In the words of CRAIGIE HORSFIELD, ‘tapestry has a materiality and presence, of substance and structure, and a shifting potential of scale in the movement between its woven detail and the architectural space it can construct, its habitable space, both lived and constructed. It also has a history that is to some extent familiar but far enough from the generality of present practice to allow invention largely without constraint of custom and convention’.

His new exhibition entitled Slow Time and the Present on the second floor of the Kunsthalle Basel is made up of pieces of Frescoes and monumental tapestries of photographs and film stills depicting subjects from the crowd at a gig by Italian band 99 Posse, where the artist perforated an eardrum, to a 17-foot representation of a firework display in the bay of Naples. Behind their documentary nature (each title bears the full name of the subject, as well as the place where and the date when the image was captured), these works imbue the illustrated reality with a dimension of uncertainty and suspension close to that of painting.

For this exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, HORSFIELD has created two large-scale works (Processione dei Gigli, Via Cocozza, Nola. June 2008 (2012) and At 99 Posse concert. Via Gianturco, Naples. February 2010 (2012)), using recently developed technology that transfers contemporary imagery into the historical medium of fresco and three new tapestries (The Arciconfraternity of Santa Monica, Chiesa SS. Annunziata. Sorrento, April 2010 (2012),  Above the Bay of Naples from Via Partenope, Naples, September 2008 (2012) and Broadway, 14th day, 18 minutes after dusk. New York, September 2001 (2012)) conceived by HORSFIELD with his long time collaborators MARCOS LUDUENA-SEGRE, and ROLAND & CHRISTIAN DEKEUKELAERE at Flanders Tapestries in Belgium.

We together make art in our reading, our attention, our recognition and in the ways in which our experience is translated. We generate the consequences which realise art’s meanings. We as the audience, the viewers or readers, make the work in and through our present, the present of which both the past and the future, both consequence and effect, is predicated. It happens in our thoughtfulness together, in our conversation and in a relating that goes beyond the space of the museum. – CRAIGIE HORSFIELD, 2012

And good news: Slow Time and the Present is currently on view at Kunsthalle Basel, until August 26, 2012.