‘If The Mountain Is Burning, Let It Burn’ is an exhibition of new photographic and recent video work that draws from Claudia Nicholson’s archive of over two hundred photographs of Colombia, her birthplace—Bogotá, and her life in Australia.
Moving between analogue and digital methods, and marking Nicholson’s first time working in photography, the artist is re-examining and deconstructing the archive anew. The exhibition includes a series of large-scale photographs and an installation of The Deep Rivers Say it Slowly (2023), a video which formally borrows from the photographic slideshow. The varied yet rhythmic nature of her photographs and videos reflects her interest in the workings of memory.
The exhibition takes its title from the song Que Se Quema El Monte [That The Mountain Is Burning] (2006) by the renowned Colombian bullerengue musician Etelvina Maldonado. Nicholson’s translation is comparatively devastating and instructive and evokes the emotional resonances of the archive, rather than the search for essential truths. If The Mountain Is Burning, Let It Burn gestures towards a moment of regeneration, a state of perpetuity, and a boiling point.
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