FOTOPUB 2017_ Novo Mesto_ Slovenia_
Part of KINDLING, curated by Rachel Dedman
Fotopub is an annual festival of photography in Slovenia, scheduled for 1st-6th August. The team of organisers invited me to curate one of their four main exhibitions for this year’s iteration, with a focus on practices from the Middle-East and Mediterranean.
Kindling - Made up of seven new commissions by artists, architects and researchers from Lebanon, Palestine, India and Brazil, Kindling expands established notions of image-making, bringing together work by those whose practices do not usually deal with the photograph as photograph.
What processes of translation occur when the concerns of an artistic practice, usually channelled in particular material directions, are asked to reckon with the aesthetics, histories and cultural weight of another medium? What if the photograph was not a final form, but an initial catalyst for work?
The works in Kindling deal with photography’s contradictions: as a medium simultaneously physical and immaterial; able to provoke memory, yet incapable of adequately summoning lived experience; representing both extended temporality, and ubiquitous immediacy. Stretching the possibilities of making images without and beyond the camera, the projects address the political agency of photography as loaded historical gesture, mechanical tool and personal totem.
Each participant has been invited to consider the exhibition an opportunity to reorient or reflect critically upon their current work and ongoing practice – be it painting, academic research, performance or architecture – through the lens of photography’s aesthetics, mechanics, economics, histories or politics. The exhibition renders the image the ultimate subject at stake in the show, and calls for an expanded approach to its place and potential in creative practice.
Ghaith Abi Ghanem and Jad Melki, Print Imprint Press Impress, cast plaster, fabric, foam, metal, ink, wood, paper, latex, 2017
Architectural studio Ghaith&Jad have taken as their starting point the photograph as a reductive abstraction of matter, a flattening of real space into surface. Their intervention for Kindling explores the reverse, using the weight and heft of an architectural cast as a vessel for the making of prints in other materials. Ink poured through its apertures, rust gathered on its surface, water dried around its bulk, latex folded around its exterior – these interventions record the object’s negative space and mark its relationship to material, the result of a fleeting moment or protracted time. Reversing standard architectural processes, the model here precedes its drawings – rendered not as mimetic representation, but by virtue of the elemental meeting of surfaces. Their gesture is as much an abstraction as the photographic, but one that departs from presence and physicality, as opposed to reduction into flatness.
