The Red Line 3

The Red Line is part of a trilogy of works (which includes The Blue Line & The Black Line) produced out of the same pool of images as A Small Guide to the Invisible Seas, sourced from Greek, Turkish and Soviet Armenian tourist catalogues, from the 60s to the 80s. Instead of weaving together the diverse found material in an invisible new topography, the trilogy questions the construction of national identities by exploring specific recurrent symbols associated with each of the nation states. Where A Small Guide to the Invisible Seas unearthed new topographies through gaps and layering of images, the new works abstract, take over through lines and colours what has already been constructed. Referencing both the censorship line and the visual language of constructivism, the insertion of the line is also a humorous dismantling gesture. In The Red Line, images of the great Soviet industrial operation are piled up, forced into a single space, reinforcing that glorious moment of construction, only to be interrupted by that infuriating red line of abstraction that breaks up, interrupts any sense of ideological unity. It is the red line that cannot be crossed and at the same time the line (the ideology) of the Soviet state.