Made with the participation and collaboration of Mark Etchells.

Accepting an invitation from curator Magda Grudzińska, to create a work based on a visit to the six eastern partnership countries (Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine), Etchells established a framework, designed to bring him closer to the unfamiliar realities and cityscapes of those countries whilst at the same time keeping his experience of them indirect, mediated through the eyes and narratives of others. In fact Etchells agreed to the project only on condition that another person - his brother Mark - make the trip east on his behalf, relaying his experience in the form of emails, stories and photographs.

In a further spin, From Afar established that the artists' brother, re-cast as envoy on an uncertain mission, would meet a selection of strangers in each city he visits whose task would be to introduce Mark to the places in which they lived through a number of stories linked to specific locations. Sharing places and stories - personal and collective, intimate and societal - and seeing how they move and morph in the process of being passed on from the inhabitants of these cities to the artist’s brother, and then from him to Etchells himself, From Afar plays on the creative and defective possibilities involved in the transmission of knowledge and experience.  From Minsk to Kiev, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Baku and Chișinău what arises from the project is a set of remote viewings, second hand images relayed from one person to another in a complex web of collective exchange and collaboration.  From Afar works the space between stories and reality, distance and proximity to create a deliberately partial and fragile invocation of places to which the artist has never been and which he has experienced only through experiences of others.