Exeter - Hollow Earth: Art, Caves and the Subterranean Imaginary

 An exhibition at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter in Devon, entitled "Hollow Earth: Art, Caves and the Subterranean Imaginary" is on until Jan 2024.

It shows how artists have portrayed caves over the years, so is not really an exhibition on caves, but different art forms. However there are some displays of animal bones found in caves, as Devon was one of the areas of early cave studies and contains important prehistoric cave deposits. William Pengelly was one of the pioneer researchers.

The exhibition is divided into five sections in two rooms and has works by more than 30 artists. I am not an artistic or creative person, so many of the exhibits were rather meaningless to me. I did like the old photos of researchers at various rock art.

There was a short contemporary film set in and around Thor's Cave in the Peak District, Derbyshire.  The film, "Echoes from the Void", by Michael Ho considers the cave as a kind of echo chamber and draws on imagery borrowed from Chinese myth and folklore. "Ho explains that the film, ‘re-examines the children’s game of ‘Chinese whispers’ within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the age of digital media. It seeks to discuss the East Asian diaspora as well as notions of cultural mismatch through the exposure of the mechanisms in which mis- and disinformation are produced, disseminated and consumed" - from Exeter Chamber.

There is a much longer, 46 minute, film in the other room, by Lydia Ourahmane. Made in 2022 at UNESCO World Heritage Site of Tassili n’Ajjer in the Sahara Desert, which is home to one of the most important groups of prehistoric rock art in the world, dating back to 12,000 BCE. The real scenery is stunning but I couldn't appreciate how it was filmed using low light levels and jerky out of focus shots, with many minutes of the camera "flying" just above ground level which could make some people feel "seasick". From Exeter Chamber "Describing the transformation of life in the region over thousands of years, Ourahmane’s commissioned film installation depicts otherworldly images of demons, extra- terrestrials and lost rivers. The first time Ourahmane visited, there were three water sources; now there is only one. Soon there may be none, and it will be almost impossible to travel there. Ourahmane described this ambitious journey as ‘an act of translation, an experiment of what we might unearth together’. The wordless film features an ‘exquisite corpse’-style soundtrack, composed by four musicians.

The wall mounted screen seen in the photo above was showing a film on the seed vault in Svalbard in Arctic Norway. This was of interest to me as I saw the outside of the seed bank less than 5 months ago in June 2023 -

The exhibition is free to visit. You can read a lot more detail about the art on the RAMM page and also Exeter Chamber.