Still from Mat Collishaw’s Sky Burial
In this interview Mat Collishaw speaks to Darius Riahy about his latest project.
This November, the Paris-based Insula Orchestra and conductor Laurence Equilbey join forces with British installation artist Mat Collishaw to present Sky Burial, inspired by Fauré’s ethereal Requiem, in London.
Mat Collishaw is a key figure in the influential cohort of British Artists who emerged in the late 1980s, producing artwork that uses photography and video. Trained at Goldsmiths College in London, Collishaw was one of 16 young artists who participated in the seminal Freeze exhibition organized by Damien Hirst in 1988. His contribution to the exhibition was Bullet Hole, a closeup photo of what appears to be a bullet hole wound in the scalp of a person’s head, mounted on 15 light boxes. It remains one of his best-known works.
Since then, Mat Collishaw has continued to reflect on the nature of the human subconscious and to explore ways to influence it through various media. These include optical illusions, paintings, projections and moving sculptures. Most of his art pieces contain references to historical themes and classical techniques of portraying nature. But borrowed images are digitally processed. The results are often haunting. As Jonathan Jones once wrote in The Guardian: “Not for [Collishaw] the abstract evasion, the minimalist half smile… he wants to punch your imagination in the stomach. He justifies the art of sensation by showing how it can have depth in its oomph.”
He has created Sky Burial as a video reflection on death, ritual, humankind and nature in a post-industrial society. In this Mat Collishaw about the motivation behind the project, and what he hopes to achieve with it. 
Sky Burials premieres at the Barbican Centre in London in November 2023.
Photo: still from Collishaw’s film
Read: Interview with conductor Laurence Equilbey about Sky Burial