Exhibition
La Camera
29.01 – 28.02.2016
(work of Attila Csörgő)
Exhibition
La Camera
29.01 – 28.02.2016
(work of Attila Csörgő)
LA CAMERA
29 January – 28 February 2016, Salone Banca di Bologna – Palazzo De’ Toschi
Curated by Simone Menegoi
The exhibition
LA CAMERA: Sulla materialità della fotografia (La Camera: On the Material Nature of Photography) is the third installment in a broader exhibition program, curated by Simone Menegoi and titled The Camera’s Blind Spot, which explores the relationship between sculpture and photography. The first two parts of the project (The Camera’s Blind Spot I and II) were respectively held at MAN – Museo d’Arte della Provincia di Nuoro in Sardinia (2013) and at Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp (2015).
It will present works by a sizeable group of international artists: Dove Allouche, Paul Caffell, Elia Cantori, Attila Csörgő, Linda Fregni Nagler, Paolo Gioli, Franco Guerzoni, Raphael Hefti, Marie Lund, Ives Maes, Justin Matherly, Lisa Oppenheim, Johan Österholm, Anna Lena Radlmeier, Evariste Richer, Fabio Sandri, Simon Starling, Luca Trevisani, and Carlos Vela-Prado.
Exhibitions about the overlap between sculpture and photography often limit themselves to a more classic view of this relationship, with photography used to revisit and document pre-existing three-dimensional works. This is a formula that originated with photography itself, and took an extraordinarily creative turn when sculptors like Medardo Rosso and Costantin Brancusi, at the turn of the century, shouldered cameras and began photographing their own works in varying conditions of light and space. The Camera’s Blind Spot not only tries to trace the most recent developments in this trend, but to take other equally important possibilities into account; first and foremost, that the material aspect of the photographic image can be accentuated to the point that the latter becomes an object. This is a challenge to what has been the technology’s “blind spot” from the outset: the impossibility of rendering a three-dimensional object on a flat surface.
The third installment in the series, titled LA CAMERA: Sulla materialità della fotografia shifts the center of this investigation towards the photographic medium. An exhibition setting created within the main hall of Palazzo De’ Toschi (the title of the show being a play on words between the English meaning of “camera” and its Italian one, “room”) will house works made with the rarest and most unusual photosensitive techniques currently used by visual artists and photographers: from Evariste Richer’s daguerreotypes to Paul Caffell’s platinum prints, and from Attila Csörgő’s spherical photographic scans to Justin Matherly’s “inkjet monoprints”. A collection of photographic eccentricities, archaisms, and hapax legomena, its aim is to subvert viewers’ usual assumptions about the medium and make them experience anew, for at least a moment, their nineteenth-century ancestors’ awe at an invention that revolutionized visual culture and our relationship to reality itself. This is not a challenge to the digital realm per se (digital techniques like scanning or 3D printing are even at the core of some works in the show) but to its absolute hegemony; to the notion that since its advent, all other photographic techniques have become obsolete and can only be abandoned.
Lastly, sculpture. The other key theme of The Camera’s Blind Spot turns up in the third part of the project as well. At times, in the subjects: the Roman statues photographed by Paolo Gioli through a process of his own invention, involving phosphorescent film; or the stalagmites and stalactites, nature’s own sculptures, which Dove Allouche captures on glass with the nineteenth-century technique of ambrotype. More often, sculpture re-emerges through the physical presence of works that are based on photographic techniques, yet which one hesitates to call “photographs”: for instance, Johan Österholm’s Structure for Moon Plates and Moon Shards (2015), an assemblage built from old greenhouse glass, coated in photosensitive emulsion and then exposed to moonlight. In an era when the photographic image tends to be dematerialized, the individual “photographic objects” in the exhibition present themselves as true sculptures.
The artists
- Dove Allouche
- Paul Caffell
- Elia Cantori
- Attila Csörgő
- Liz Deschenes
- Linda Fregni Nagler
- Paolo Gioli
- Franco Guerzoni
- Raphael Hefti
- Marie Lund
- Ives Maes
- Justin Matherly
- Lisa Oppenheim
- Johan Österholm
- Anna Lena Radlmeier
- Evariste Richer
- Fabio Sandri
- Simon Starling
- Luca Trevisani
- Carlos Vela-Prado
Exhibition views
-/-
The Camera's Blind Spot III, La Camera, 2016w
The Camera's Blind Spot III, La Camera Palazzo Dè Toschi Bologna 01.2016_0093w
The Camera's Blind Spot III, La Camera Palazzo Dè Toschi Bologna 01.2016_0077w
The Camera's Blind Spot III, La Camera Palazzo Dè Toschi Bologna 01.2016_0009w
Informations
- EXIBITION CURATED BY
- Simone Menegoi
- ASSISTANT CURATOR
- Barbara Meneghel
- DATES
- 29 January – 28 February 2016
- LOCATION
- Salone Banca di Bologna – Palazzo De’ Toschi
- COLOPHON
- Graphic design: Filippo Nostri; Photographs: Dario Lasagni; Intern: Eleonora Milani.
Press
- PRESS RELEASE
- Press release
- PRESS OFFICE
- Sara Zolla
- PRESS REVIEW
-
Fotografia Reflex
Mousse
la Republica Bologna
il Resto del Carlino
D la Repubblica delle Donne
Fotografia Reflex
Artribune
ATP Diary
ATP Diary
Nero Magazine
Exibart
Interni
Fotozona.it