P.Y.M. (2024) 16' 53", 4K digital video, stereo digital audio

‘P.Y.M.’ (2024) shows twenty-nine specific sites in Belgium and northern France where my grandfather, Percy Young McNiven, can be placed accurately during the his service with the Royal Scots during the First World War. These include the sites of the battles of Loos, the Somme and Passchendaele. The work aims to recover something of both my grandfather’s personal history and the histories of his comrades; to respond to and offer alternatives to forms and practices of memorialisation and remembrance which have emerged in the years since the last participants of this war died and the advent of the ‘culture wars'; and to represent a sequence of particularly charged sites from which all material traces of the war have disappeared, and where, in most cases, only the topography of the landscape familiar to its participants remains - the places where many of those died or were marked for life in their tens of thousands.

'P.Y.M.' was made for 'De Verplaatsing' (The Relocation) at Pictura, Dordrecht (NL), in 2024, an exhibition collaboration with Frans van Lent. This work was supported by Creative Scotland.

(Viewing at 4K resolution is recommended. Sound up.)

Lt Percy Young McNiven, MC & Bar, 13th Battalion Royal Scots (1891-1972)