Exhibition: We Knew the Terrain by Matthew Burdis

Galleri Image presents the exhibition We Knew the Terrain by Matthew Burdis. The exhibition brings together three moving image works that consider the significance of landscape in politics, media, and memory. Made over a period of ten years, each film centres on a location in Northumberland, the northernmost county in England.
The title comes from the most recent of these works, Hinter: An Apocalypse, 2026. The film, which will have its world premiere in Galleri Image was written by Rachel Chanter, narrated by Claire Rodgerson (The Old Oak), with an original score by Barry Hyde (The Futureheads).
Hinter is a film rooted in the history, both recent and ancient, of the area surrounding Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, UK. Questioning the nature of enclosure and land ownership, the piece traces a common thread of human self-destruction from the colonial project, stretching back to the Roman Empire, to the acts of ecological vandalism that take place on both large and small scales in the present day.
Burdis and Chanter walked the stretch of Hadrian’s Wall, where the famous Sycamore Gap tree stood, just four days before it was cut down with a chainsaw on the night of September 27th 2023. The shocking and mysterious felling of the tree made international news and opened up a conversation about the nature of the crime that had been committed, raising issues of ownership, ecocide, and the legal status of the natural world.
Seeking to encapsulate this quiet landscape that is at the same time a teeming repository of stories, violence, politics, and existential lessons, Hinter functions as both an elegy for an ancient tree and a protest against human greed and abuse of power.
In Zipped Up Blues, which in addition to a film also incorporates objects and photographic works, centres Burdis’ father, Alan Burdis, recalling his memories of searching for the wreckage of Pan Am Flight 103, after the aeroplane was destroyed by a bomb during its scheduled flight on December 21st, 1988, often referred to as the Lockerbie bombing.
In Zipped Up Blues, searching takes various forms: the physical police procedural search for potential threats and evidence; the artist’s search through digitised analogue photographs from his own childhood, and the artist’s father following his memories of the investigation into areas that have remained locked for decades.
The exhibition also includes the first moving image work made by the artist, Lindisfarne One One. It is a silent, black and white, digital film shot on the tidal island of Lindisfarne, Northumberland. The film deals with personal and historical loss, reflecting on the intersection of first-hand memories of the island and its representation in cinema.

About the artist
Matthew Burdis (b. 1993, Newcastle upon Tyne) is an artist-filmmaker. He studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design; Weißensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin; The Royal College of Art, London, and at The University of Sunderland.
He makes films that incorporate photography to investigate a moment or memory of a specific location, often focusing on a tangible or performative object as an anchor point. This includes his 2023 film Interior (The Spectator), narrated by Willem Dafoe, which contemplates the artist’s relationship to the painter Howard Hodgkin, through working in his home and archive.
Burdis’ work has been screened and exhibited internationally, including the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, and as part of Serpentine Cinema: On Earth, Missing and Memory and Serpentine Cinema & General Ecology: On Earth at the Long Now at Kraftwerk Berlin. In 2023 Burdis’ work was selected for New Contemporaries and was exhibited that year at the Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, and in 2024 at Camden Arts Centre, London.

The exhibition is supported by The Danish Arts Foundation, The Augustinus Foundation, the Obel Family Foundation, The Louis-Hansen Foundation, and The William Demant Foundation.

https://galleriimage.dk/en/event/we-knew-the-terrain-by-matthew-burdis/

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