Dissent Module, Rachel Ara, St Helier Town Church Yard,
5 September - 15 October 2023
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 about the Dissent Module from the day of ‘landing’ 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.”
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).