Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

The title of this exhibition is derived from the first and last Morse Code messages to be transmitted. The first Morse Code message was transmitted by the inventor Samuel F.B. Morse on 24 May, 1844. His message was “What hath God wrought”. The last commercially transmitted Morse Code message was “Calling all, this is our last cry before our eternal silence”, French navy, 1997. Over the past few years, Chris Wainwright has used both these systems of communication to make a series of performance based photographic and installation works, often from ships at sea, and in various coastal locations in Europe, Taiwan and extensively in the Tohoku Region of Japan, the area massively affected by the great eastern earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. The messaging elements of the work refer to a range of environmental issues including: climate change, coastal erosion, earthquakes, climate enforced displacement and nuclear pollution. It focuses on the fragility of our relationship with the natural world due to the way we continue to exploit its natural resources in our need and desire to consume that is in turn bringing about irreversible climatic changes. The 20 photographs displayed in the exhibition were taken when Wainwright did his residency in a Taiwanese sugar factory and when he visited different seashores in Taiwan and Japan. They are images and messages created by Wainwright as he faced his camera in the dark night and made semaphores with traffic batons in his hands. One of the set includes six photographs taken by the sea in Taitung, revealing the semaphoric message of “carved into the bone of a turtle.” The series, Pause, includes two photographs, which are staged photography of semaphoric performance taken on beaches in Kenting in the evening and at sunrise in Taitung. Fishing Fleet includes five time-lapse photographs taken at a Japanese sea coast in night time, revealing bright dots of fishing boats catching fish together near the sea horizon and a long boat sliding across the images as a narrow dash of light. Through these images captured in real life, the artist responded to and reminded audience of the historic meaning and intriguing symbols of Morse Code that was once used in nautical communication. Constellation is another set of photographs taken at a specific site, seemingly conveying a symbolic message. Using Taitung Sugar Factory as a backdrop, this set is comprised of seven consecutive photographs of slowly moving light dots on the floor of the sugar factory. In comparison to the fixed iron post in the images, these bright dots seemed to correspond to the last Morse Code and were giving out their “last cry before eternal silence”!