PARALLEL REVIEW LISBOA. ACTS OF DISAPPEARANCE – RARELY PURE, NEVER SIMPLE

15 de Dezembro de 2018

Exposição patente no Palácio Sinel de Cordes, sede da Trienal de Arquitetura de Lisboa, no Campo de Santa Clara, 142, em Lisboa, de 28 de novembro a 15 de dezembro de 2018.

O PARALLEL REVIEW LISBOA apresenta pela primeira vez em conjunto todo o trabalho criado pelos artistas e curadores emergentes durante o 1.º ciclo do PARALLEL – European Photo Based Platform. As exposições serão complementadas por uma série de actividades relacionadas com a fotografia contemporânea.

A primeira edição decorrerá no Campo de Santa Clara com um núcleo central no antigo mercado de Santa Clara e actividades em locais circundantes: Palácio Sinel de Cordes (Trienal de Arquitectura) e Polo Cultural São Vicente.

Este evento pretende criar uma âncora para analisar, discutir e produzir fotografia em Lisboa, reconhecendo a importância da imagem como documento contemporâneo e promovendo o diálogo entre os seus actores: artistas/criadores, público e cidade.”,

refere a organização.

No Palácio Sinel de Cordes, sede da Trienal de Arquitetura de Lisboa, no Campo de Santa Clara, 142, em Lisboa, de 28 de novembro a 15 de dezembro de 2018, foram apresentadas as exposições RARELY PURE, NEVER SIMPLE e ACTS OF DISAPPEARANCE.

RARELY PURE, NEVER SIMPLE

Apresenta as séries de Josèphine Desmenez (FR), Livia Sperandio , Nita Vera (FI), Philipp Meuser (DE). A curadoria é de Maria Faarinen (FI).

Esta exposição foi apresentada no UGM Studio, em Maribor, de 18 de maio a 9 de junho de 2018.

When it comes to values, politics or religion, most of us are willing to accept that people’s outlooks and world views are different. But what about the everyday things: places, objects, people, even our own emotions and memories? Are they not just as open to interpretation? Are they similarly devoid of any fixed, permanent core?

The exhibition Rarely Pure, Never Simple deals with uncertainty and ambiguity from different perspectives. The starting point has been to look at ordinary and familiar things with new eyes. The exhibition features four young photographic artists who took part in the international exchange and mentorship programme PARALLEL – European Photo Based Platform during its first phase. All the works in the exhibition are completely new, created in 2018. Joséphine Desmenez (born 1993, France) has photographed portraits in a way that departs from tradition and particularly the conventions of social media. She has hunted for moments of imperfection and loss of control to reveal the vulnerability of the models. Philipp Meuser (born 1986, Germany) sieves through the sediment of history and mythology in one of the most popular tourist destinations in Germany. The island today known as Rügen has an exciting history, but what is the meaning of the past in a geographical place? Are there traces from the past other than the sediment investigated by archaeologists? And if the place has been mythical in the past, can there still be some true magic?

Livia Sperandio (born 1991, Italy) explores ways of perception via photography. What is the relation between an everyday object and a photograph of it? An ordinary object that is in everyday use can be so banal it becomes almost invisible. Can that same object in a photograph be something else, something we observe or sense differently?

Nita Vera (born 1986, Finland) has written autofictional love stories, and to create a textual basis, has worked in cooperation with psychotherapists and theatre-makers. In an intense working process, she has dived deep into her experiences from psychological and physical perspectives. The project highlights memories and histories as a story, many times told and always a construction.

In the context of Nita Vera’s project, the name of the exhibition could easily refer to love and relationships. The name could just as easily denote photography. Both are “rarely pure, never simple”. Primarily the name is a reference to Oscar Wilde and the original quotation in full is: “The truth is rarely pure and never simple” (from The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895). In the light of everyday reason, we believe we know what is true. It makes everyday life uncomplicated and smooth. Therefore, rejecting certain truths can feel scary. However, an inquisitive mind can find that a wider horizon of possibilities is revealed from behind the ready answers. Because if nothing is certain, everything might still be possible.

Maria Faarinen

Livia Sperandio / Out of the cave

Philipp Meuser / Waiting for Buyan

(exposição também apresentada em ACTION AT A DISTANCE)

Josèphine Desmenez / Delivered

(Reprodução a partir do catálogo)

Nita Vera / Unfinished script

(Reprodução a partir do catálogo)

ACTS OF DISAPPEARANCE

Apresenta as séries de Nuno Barroso (PT), Emanuel Cederqvist (SE), Ida Nissen (DK), Joshua Phillips, Morten Barker (DK), Thomas Wynne. A curadoria é de Bruno Humberto (PT).

Esta exposição foi apresentada no Fotofestiwal de Lodz, de 21 de junho a 1 de julho de 2018.

ACTS OF DISAPPEARANCE – WAYS OF DISAPPEARING IN PHOTOGRAPHY AND LANDSCAPE

“The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

.

Acts of disappearance brings together a group of artists who have in common the use of photography as a tool of action – beyond the medium in which they operate and the object on which they rely – to talk about transience and impermanence of landscape. An exhibition with a series of installation works where images are a celebration and a reflection about the “being forever on the alert”. The works of Morten Barker, Nuno Barroso, Emanuel Cederqvist, Ida Nissen, Joshua Phillips and Thomas Wynne are about redefining the gaze on reality, beyond the subjectivity of the human eye, underlining the impermanent, transitory and ephemeral nature of landscape in its extendable notion.

1. “If I were to be asked what we are, I should answer: “We are the door to everything that can be, we are the expectation that no material response can satisfy, no trick with words deceive. We seek the heights. Each one of us can ignore this search if he has a mind to, but mankind as a whole aspires to these heights; they are the only definition of his nature, his only justification and significance” – Georges Bataille, Eroticism

By exchanging “words” for “photos” in this quote from Bataille, we are free to say that there is no image that can satisfy, elude or take us away from the normative, everyday cataclysm within which our existence seems to stagnate. In this exhibition we are not so much interested in exposing photos, but more in reflecting on what is impossible to be exhibited. The dark room nowadays is a screen of overlapping windows and seemingly infinite light, where information does not move us but rather invades and steals our sleep hours.

2.Blaise Cendrars, in an interview, spoke about the necessary conditions for a writer to operate:

“A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be. Like Saint Jerome, a writer should work in his cell. Turn the back. Writing is a view of the spirit. “The world is my representation.” Humanity lives in its fiction. This is why a conqueror always wants to transform the face of the world into his image. Today, I even veil the mirrors.”

Blaise Cendrars, The Art of Fiction No. 38, Paris Review, Issue 37, Spring 1966

The landscape for the photographer here functions as the cell of Saint Jerome, but more like an infinite cell, where we are constituent parts of the world and, conscious of this, perceive the fiction that humanity artificially imposes on the world. The production and reproduction of images are only the articulation of a discourse, permeable and controlled by an “order of discourse”, contextually based on an idea of historical “man” that will tend to become obsolete and to disappear, as Foucault told us.

The photographer, as the writer, seeks the conditions to be able to articulate a discourse with his own sensitivity, a continuous attempt to go beyond the narrative of our great and continuous spectacle.

3. The photographer does not need to photograph. We know that collage, assemblage, the use of archive images and their reconfiguration are not new techniques in photography and that digital graphic editing tools are extensive and booming. Another question is its use, the discourse that can be created and how poetic cuts with the tradition and the perception of reality can happen, as it happens, for example, with Chris Marker in film and with Adam Curtis’s documentaries.

In this exhibition, one of the cases that elaborate a cut and an original speech in photography is the work of Morten Barker. He uses photographs of NASA’s Apollo Program in the Moon and of a specific horizon from Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima Mon Amour (which also gives the title to his piece) to produce a single photo (with 1.645 x 55 cm or 129600×4331 pixels equal to one pixel pr. frame of the movie) bringing together in one landscape – the ghost of what disappeared and what is becoming. We encounter it as a long sequence shot in a film or as if each frame is happening simultaneously, reminiscent of an Aleph effect (in the homonymous short story by Jorge Luis Borges).

4. The photographer goes to the place that was photographed. In Emanuel Cederqvist’s case, he travels around the same places and lives the same conditions as Axel Hamberg, in the mountains where he photographed the landscape and disappeared (the landscape or the man?). His material is a continuation; it is a humble and genial dialogue that takes the shape, in this case, of photography, but with the poetic outlines of a great expedition or a walking art piece. Here a reflection on time, death and the transformation of things, which makes us look at the landscape, the existence in an uninterrupted way.

5. The photographer heads towards South looking for images. In the case of Nuno Barroso, he drew a line in the direction of Morocco, which appeared parallel to New Mexico (strangely enough, on the American side, on July 16, 1945, the first nuclear test — code name Trinity — was made).

Here, travelling, searching for clues or more articulated signals in the landscape, works as a form of understanding impermanence and transience in nature and humankind or as a certain type of ecology. Present there is also a quality of a constant non projection onto the object, even the contrary of it: as if the landscapes reveal the spirit and the selfless, inquisitive nature of the photographer.

6. The photographer photographs what he does not see. In Thomas Wynne’s case, he works on what disappears behind the photograph, which is also a place of seduction, photography materialized as a wall, where another landscape opens, or where a narrative is built without any one ever having access to it. This work is also about the possibility of photography as an object of hindrance, of camouflage, of illusion, assumed by the subject, now facing the impossibility of walking behind the object (because on doing that he/she would be altering the narrative on the other side, and be obscured by the shadow in the picture’s back). In his work, on the Duality of being here or there, he explores the nowhere and the very liminal ground condition where the photographer stands.

7. The photographer starts with a detail of a found photograph. Joshua Phillips zooms in a wallpaper motif that he found in a design magazine, to fuel and start a series of works about how the natural patterns are spread across objects in the everyday life, through cross-over imagery, and how a certain appropriation of nature operates in some apparatuses. Wallpapers, carpets, china plates are in fact micro forests, oriental and Victorian gardens ready to be reassembled, reused, not as ornaments, but as fields for contrast and reflection on disappearance, through accumulation, collage, arrangement and reallocation.

8. The photographer waits for the disappearance of the image. Disappearance through visual and sensorial abstraction is the powerful work that Ida Nissen presents with depth. Closing the circle, in this collective experience, she proposes a return of photography that is an advance: photography as sculpture, photography as matter and light, its links to a certain magic and ghostly features (that in the beginning of the medium were more present), and to geology and chemistry as well. In a world where all processes are accelerated and mediated by vertical screens where the order of discourse is mastered, she places us to look at something that disappears, like us, during the exhibition.

The role of the photographer goes beyond commenting the fleeting nature of things and documentation of the world. The photographer must direct our gaze as observation is action and an integral part of ecology.