"... They bring their radios, which I hear when the breeze carries the sound to me. Glimpses of speech and music. ... But you know, before all this, before them – before them there was only nature, only instinct. Everything was the same."
- Novosibirsk, 1996
"... [Poidebard] stopped short of the epigraphically rich environs of Jerusalem. So, with our own terrestrial work having proved so profitless, we took this as an opportunity to enroll some local pilots and aircraft and embarked on our own aerial studies of Bethany."
- l’École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem, 1969
'Before and After' is a display of two audiovisual artworks, The Incoherence of the Incoherence (2010) and As if, Prokudin-Gorsky! (2012). The general problem that they both address, through various analogies, is of being confined to the present, like a number without any awkward fractions left over.
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Matthew MacKisack is a London-based artist and doctoral researcher at Goldsmiths College, University of London. See www.mmackisack.org
