Graeme Miller  

An intimate and resonant audio-visual installation by Graeme Miller, Beheld connects its audience with the disturbing phenomenon of people who fell from the sky. Ten glass vessels are charged with 180º images taken at locations where the bodies of stowaways have fallen from aircraft. On lifting these bowls they resonate with the sound of their location.

Over two years Miller visited places around the world where migrants have fallen from aircraft – stowaways who have hidden in the wheel bays of commercial airlines. As the planes approach airports and lower their wheels, so their bodies fall to the ground, charging a particular piece of ground with significance.

A 14 year-old boy falls into a field in the Black Forest. A Pakistani man falls into a Homebase car park in Richmond. An unknown Russian falls into a suburban garden near Paris. As the bodies fall by chance and enter another’s particular space, those below can choose to hold or to let fall this passing life. Geographies, personal and political, collide or connect; the migrant meets the settled, the living meet the dead.