Archipelago

Clarifications.

Confusing yet illuminating; this work by Pau Ardid is somehow making more sense of the world by deliberately obscuring our reading of it. Ardid has carefully selected single pages from daily newspapers, placed them over his bedroom window and photographed them. The key is the editing and selection process - the straightforward captioning hands everything over to the viewer for interpretation and a game of free association:

A space shuttle launches over a mass prayer session; a political demonstration clashes with an airbus demonstration; holocaust memoirs & soldiers retreating; a camcorder with built in projector printed over Robert Capa's suitcase archive.

I am interested in how such a low-economy / light hearted gesture can communicate quite grand ideas about our perception of the world. Or at least our perception as seen through the window of press imagery. The use of his own bedroom window, his personal viewpoint on the world, is no accident. What the artist sees is a society of transparency and absurdity.
pauardid.com
Recommended reading: Alfredo Cramerotti, Aesthetics of Journalism: How to inform without informing.
intellectbooks.co.uk

In a similar way to Simon Roberts Mikhael Subotzky opts to focus on subjects found in his home country rather than traveling to far away exotic lands. This time in South Africa, and in particular the city of Johannesburg.
I have just recently returned from a trip to South Africa & Mozambique. Whilst driving around Joburg there are 2 things that dominated the experience for me - the dramatic lightning storms and the infamous skyline. One building more than others has taken on an iconic status - The fifty-four-storey Ponte city, which is the subject of a collaborative project between Mikhael Subotzky & Patrick Waterhouse.

"Ponte became a symbol of the downturn in central Johannesburg. The reality of the building and its many fictions have always integrated seamlessly into a patchwork of myths and projections that reveals as much about the psyche of the city as it does about the building itself. Tales of brazen crack and prostitution rings operating from its car parks, four storeys of trash accumulating in its open core, snakes, ghosts and frequent suicides have all added to the building’s legend. Some of these stories are actually true, and for quite some time most of the residents were indeed illegal immigrants. And yet, one is left with the feeling that even the building’s notoriety is somewhat exaggerated – that its decline is just as fictional as its initial utopian intentions were misplaced and unrealized."

The duo went about systematically documenting the doors, windows and television sets of the apartments, and stitched the images together to form towering lightbox installations.These are accompanied by singular striking portraits of residents and the surrounding environment. These individual photographs are what Subotzky has come to be known for - powerful, gritty and iconic.

Subotzky & Waterhouse won the 2011 Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d'Arles for Ponte City.
rencontres-arles.com
subotzkystudio.com

Density & Compression.
The last show I worked on for 2011 was Michael Wolf’s first solo exhibition in the UK. Wolf’s work tackles the complexity of city life through observations of how vernacular architecture and public space are used. This exhibition was constructed from various bodies of work including Architecture of Density, Transparent City & Tokyo Compression.
flowersgalleries.com

New Terrain.
Following his first major documentary undertaking 'Motherland', which was made in Russia, English photographer Simon Roberts turned his camera on his own country. The product was 'We English' - a series of 56 large-format tableaux photographs of the English at leisure. When speaking about the work, Simon positions himself within a strong lineage of English photographers who look at Englishness and particularly the English landscape. Photographers such as Martin Parr and John Davies. He is quite conscious of the world he is entering, and there is no doubt a number of heavy visual references can be seen in the work.

'Pierdom' is a survey of Britain's Pleasure Piers and acts as a very appropriate follow up. The piers are architectural monuments to Victorian engineering, but can also be thought of as extensions to the landscape - protruding walkways that point out to sea.

As Simon moves into different areas with his work - an example being the 3-channel video piece produced alongside 'The Election project', I can't help feel that Pierdom is somehow symbolic of him leaving the solid ground of straight documentary projects behind.

We English was recently exhibited at Flowers.
simoncroberts.com
flowersgalleries.com

THE BRITISH COUNTRYSIDE IN PICTURES
"This new body of work by Abigail Reynolds is a series of assemblages that combine objects and images, books, glass and metal. The exhibition title alludes to the genteel illustrated publications from which some of the source material is taken, but the countryside pictured also extends to include modernist architecture of the fifties, festival culture of the seventies, protests at Greenham Common in the eighties and rave culture in the nineties.........The imagery and publications used in this body of work focus on various idealized or nostalgic notions of Britain, produced by very different agendas and ideologies"

seventeengallery.com

My previous post on Seba Kurtis got me thinking about the work of Moroccan artist Yto Barrada. In particular A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project. This is a series of photographs made in Tangier that subtly looks at the socio-political phenomenon of mass migration from Africa to Europe. Barrada worked around the notion that the form of the land – the very shape of Tangier’s Strait points towards Europe. Her photographs go far beyond a reportage approach and somehow reveal a deep-rooted desire and longing to be somewhere else. The work intuitively combines landscapes with figurative works and details of surfaces all of which carry a similar resonance. It is a metonymical type of work – in the sense that her physical subjects are both interconnected to, and symbolic of the bigger issue at hand.
Aesthetically and compositionally I often find myself drifting off the edges of Barrada’s images – I am left feeling like I want more. I have chosen this particular photograph because of the presence of absence, and again how this relates to Seba Kurtis’ work.
Yto Barrada also makes sculpture and video and will soon be showing work at Tate Modern in an exhibition titled 'I Decided Not to Save The World'
tate.org.uk
ytobarrada.com