Get up close to one of Elias Sime’s canvases and you see objects that are familiar: hundreds and hundreds of computer keys and circuit boards against a colourful background of thousands on thousands of braided electric wires.
Whoever thought the tech we take for granted could produce anything so beautiful? But step back and look again: it can and it does. Or more accurately Elias Sime does.
For Elias Sime (pronounced seem-A), the detritus of hundreds of keyboards and electronic devices provides a metaphorical take on the world. The colours are stunning (who would have thought there were so many colours in devices?) and the circuit boards glisten from the light filtering in from the windows of Hastings Contemporary art gallery.
Sime is an Ethiopian artist with a worldwide following. He has exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and will do so at this year’s Venice Biennale. The Hastings gallery’s adeptness in securing his latest works means that art lovers in East Sussex get the chance to see them for probably the first time.
A dialogue around the environment and the impacts of technology
They are monumental works – many taking up whole walls at the gallery. Most are determinedly abstract – but with more warmth than that word often implies. His art is collaborative and embraces folk traditions: ancient then, and very modern. A team of studio assistants help him complete the endlessly complex braiding and weaving of the copper wires that forms what would be the painted surface of a traditional canvas.
Village potters are involved too: glazed clay pots are spread out below the canvases in one of the gallery’s rooms. They look like teapots, albeit ones that have morphed into a weird and impractical shape, as in a dream. In another room, scattered round the edges are dozens of playful small pottery objects: frogs, monkeys … and televisions!
Sime describes the overall effect he wants to achieve as eregata – the Amharic word for serene, also embracing a sense of stillness or calm.
Sime: ‘The work forces me to slow down’
In a commentary to accompany the show he notes a modern malaise we’re all too familiar with: that very often our minds are buzzing, never truly still or calm: “We struggle to stop and sleep because our brains are constantly stimulated by technology – we are constantly moving faster not slower.’’ Sime takes on the challenge by embracing a notion of slowness: “My art is slowing it down. The work forces me to slow down.”
I’m not surprised: the canvases, with their intricate patchwork of circuit boards and keys, must take months to complete. No wonder he needs help. But the vision is all Sime’s. There is a consistency in the overall appearance of the works on show, although each is pleasingly different one to another. There is a chronological progression. The exhibition begins, paradoxically, on the gallery’s ground floor with his latest work, entitled Tightrope, circling up to some earlier pieces.
The works owe a lot to the unfortunate way we in the West recycle our old computers, mobile phones and other electronic paraphernalia. Sime’s Ethiopia is not even the biggest dumping ground for bulky unwanted, out-of-date devices – that dubious honour goes to Ghana. But the markets of Addis Ababa are nevertheless rich hunting grounds for what Sime is after.
The volume of this waste in Africa is truly astronomic. A UN agency involved in assessing the problem reports that in 2011, Ethiopia’s ten largest cities had in storage an estimated 4,300 tonnes of non-functional computers, TVs, mobile phones and refrigerators.
A mushrooming of e-waste
Outside Africa, the amount of e-waste not sent for recycling continues to mount: even in our own homes, we’re stockpiling an average of 30 items, up from 20 four years ago. Worldwide, there is a mushrooming of unwanted devices, with e-waste rising five times faster than documented efforts at recycling.
Recycling, however attractive the result in Sime’s case, is not the artist’s aim or his passion:
“My art is not about recycling or repurposing material but about expressing my ideas. Each material I collect has its own story and has been touched by many hands. It has its own language. All the different stories related to the material move me, and I transform these intuitive reactions into my compositions.”
But there’s no escaping the waste issue. Director Liz Gilmore says the gallery is thrilled to be showing the work of such a renowned artist, but then adds, “The exhibition offers fresh dialogue about globally important matters of environmental sustainability and the impacts of technology.” This, she says, “is made all the more poignant by the gallery’s unique position between land and sea”.
Very accessible to children (under-18s are admitted free) Elias Sime: Eregata is at Hastings Contemporary, alongside the works of Quentin Blake, until September 8.
