This exhibition shows David Bate’s photographic project ZONE. The photographs are large format prints made directly from 35mm film negatives. Made to look like large ‘snapshots’, the work pays homage to the city of Tallinn and the area round it in Estonia where the famous science fiction film Stalker (1979) by Andrei Tarkovsky was shot. The photographs borrow the plot of the film, a journey to search for a space called the ‘zone’ where supposedly the person who enters the room has their desire fulfilled when they leave it. Paradoxically, those who enter the zone do not necessarily have the desire that they think they want fulfilled, sometimes with terrible consequences.
When Bate took these photographs, Tallinn was a city in transformation from Soviet era communism to Western capitalism, so the question of desire is linked to the social transformations of the city itself. In this respect, these photographs gaze at us, for their colours, figures and space to speak their desire.
This is an anniversary celebration exhibition: ZONE was first inaugural exhibition of the new Gallery West exhibition space at Harrow in 2004.