Egyptian Gallery

Barbara Baran: Egyptian Gallery
First exhibited at Impressions Gallery of Photography, York, 1983. Grey Granite Head of King Ammenemes III also exhibited in A Positive View (Saatchi Gallery, London 1994).

"While visiting the British Museum some years ago, I saw the Egyptian Gallery transformed by sunlight. As I watched the light travel from one object to another, the feeling of being in a museum began to recede; the artefacts seemed to be on a different plane altogether, an abstract area where everything took on a monumental character and became the pure essence and symbol of its real self. In this context the walls, floors, columns and pedestals in the gallery had exactly the same significance as the objects, whose extensions or abstractions they now appeared to be. The light itself and the zones of darkness bounding it were essential to this transformation.

"Placed in the limbo of a gallery, the artefacts - gods, pharaohs, carved tablets, tombs - have no contact either with their past or with their geographical origin; no contact, that is, save through the sun. It is only when this ancient radiance, their old familiar, slides in through the windows and, slipping across heads, shoulders and clenched fists, notches the black-cut hieroglyphs with light that the objects, imbued with energy, come to life. So it is also with the architectural details of the gallery, which submit to the same process of cyclic reanimation. In this way the sun fuses all the contents of the room into an organic whole, invigorating whatever it touches, so that for a moment, in this irrradiated space, winged Horus sees again."

From a text by Barbara Baran, 1982

______________________

Selected works (gelatin silver prints):

Granite Stela of King Sesostris I, 1982

Black Schist Sarcophagus Lid of Ankhnesneferibre, 1982

Limestone Figure of a Horus Falcon, 1982

Limestone False Door and Architrave of Prahshepses, 1982

Column Flanking Ramesses I, 1982

Wall Behind the Tomb of Urirenptah, 1982