If The Mountain Is Burning, Let It Burn
Claudia Nicholson

30 July - 20 October 2024
UTS Gallery
Exhibition opening: Tuesday 30 July, 6 - 8pm

UTS Gallery is pleased to announce the forthcoming exhibition If The Mountain Is Burning, Let It Burn, by Claudia Nicholson.

If The Mountain Is Burning, Let It Burn is an exhibition of new photographic and recent video work that draws from 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, If The Mountain Is Burning, Let It Burn sees the artist re-examining and deconstructing the archive anew.

If The Mountain Is Burning, Let It Burn 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 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.

Image: Claudia Nicholson, Untitled 1, 2024, Archival Pigment Print. Courtesy the artist.