Dissent Module
Dissent Module, Rachel Ara, St Helier Town Church Yard,
5 September - 15 October 2023
Rachel Ara, Dissent Module, 2023, 300cm x 300cm x 270cm, spacecraft built by hand from recycled commercial aeroplane parts, aluminium sheet and kitchen metalware. Interior: pink anechoic foam and fur.
Rachel Ara’s Dissent Module is part of a performance event orchestrated by the artist that ‘landed’ in secret on the North of the Island on 29 August, next to the Radome site at Les Platons, as part of No Place Like Home. News of its landing spread out through social media and word of mouth as Islanders got wind of its landing. Within 48 hours, the spacecraft was removed, following police protocol for a UFO landing, and relocated to the St Helier Town Church grounds adjacent to ArtHouse at Capital House in St. Helier, free for the public to visit.
This otherworldly happening questions the dangers of returning home and where we might be welcome. Leaving its debris in our memory and by the roadside, Ara’s Dissent Module will come to rest at the Town Church Yard in St.Helier on 1 September, 2023.
Returning to earth is the most dangerous part of space travel and to return home has poignant connotations for many of us. Environmental concerns and the future of the human species are key to the narratives woven into this piece, as well as Ara’s personal story of returning to the Island to care for elderly parents which has been fraught with challenges.
Inspired by her residency for No Place Like Home, Ara considers the dissent module landing a perfect metaphor for the show and her concerns around the subject of home. She wanted to question the assumption that home is a safe place, when statistics show that home is the most dangerous place for women, often acting as a prison and the most likely place for women to be killed by partners or family members (50,000 globally last year). The Dissent Module’s barbarella-like pink fur interior with anechoic sound-proofing provides a womb-like capsule for safe travel.
Investigators, speculators and jesters reacted to, and played along with the piece as the story unfolded online, with hundreds of people heading towards the site to discover the phenomenon for the themselves. As Rachel Ara says, art should prompt questions and conversation, and Dissent Module certainly achieved that.
Some choice comments from the day on social media include:
Kev Alway “Spacious 1 bed studio apartment, not been on market since 90's. North of the island with sea views. Offers in excess of all of the rubles'.
Chris Gray “Apparently the Martians arrived looking for intelligent life form bumped into a couple of Jersey Politicians and realised that they were wasting their time.They were last seen jumping off the cliff into the sea.”
Stephanie Le Tiec “If i seen this would for sure try open it for the craic! Whys no one tried?”
Fran Schofield “Obviously a joke or stunt of some kind, the USSR hasn’t existed since 1989 and even if it was still in existence they wouldn’t write on their ‘craft’ in English”
Dave Barb “It's a Chinese spy balloon.”
A key inspiration for the work, Ara recalls, is the April Fool she still remembers of a concrete ‘palace of fun’ named Roche d’Or that had seemingly been built at Ronez quarry. A faked photograph of the enormous sci-fi building set in the quarry was published by the JEP in 1978 and reporters lay in wait for the people who turned up “walking their dog” to see it. On an Island 5 x 9 miles, it would seem unlikely that no one would have noticed this impossible structure being built, yet 1000s of people were taken in by the hoax and even local politicians raised complaints in the assembly that they were not informed of the building’s construction
Postcard designed by Rachel Ara for Dissent Module referencing the Jersey Evening Post’s 1970 April Fools Roche d’Or story.
The April Fool never existed, but stayed in people's consciences for decades, the dissent modules' appearance will be brief but its messages may stay with the audience for some time. (Footfall of the Mind). Saul Bass remarked on film title sequences that their purpose “was to create a climate for the story to unfold”. The Dissent Module acts as a sequence of events that sets the scene for the opening of No Place Like Home, an ambitious multifaceted exhibition curated by Laura Hudson and Rosalind Davis considering how each of us thinks of home and our place in the universe. The exhibition opens at Capital House on the evening of 5 September and continues until 15 October 2023.
Biography
Rachel Ara studied BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths (1994–97). Selected groups exhibitions include: Vertiginous Data, MMCA (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art), Seoul, S.Korea (2019); London Design Festival, V&A, London (2019); Vienna Biennale, The MAK, Vienna (2019); London Open 2018 Triannual, Whitechapel Gallery (2018). Solo presentations include: Dissent Module, UCL / Slade, London (2020); Transubstantiation of Knowledge, V&A, London (2018), American Beauty (A Trump L'Oeil), Barbican Centre, London (2018) and in 2017-2018 Rachel Ara was the Digital Artist in Residence at the V&A, London. Ara has been a recipient of numerous awards and grants including; Arts Council England Grant (2019/2020), the coLAB Women Make Sculpture Commission (2019/2020), and was awarded first prize at the International Aesthetica Art Prize (2016). Recent Publications include: 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow, Thames & Hudson (2019), 50 Women Sculptors, Aurora, (2020).
