2 июн. 2012 г.

Выставка современной эстонской фотографии Cross Time

 ВЫСТАВКИ 



В вильнюсской галерее Prospekto galerija открылась выставка современной эстонской фотографии Cross Time.

Photographic images – as default – are red in the context of time. Be it "stopping" time, "looking back" in time – or symbolically connecting different times with the help of photographs. Since Einstein'ian concept of chronotopes that were – in the context of humanities – more fully developed by literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, the notion of time has transformed into more complicated concepts. Interestingly enough our current "computer age" seems to prove these pretty well. First of all we have started to make difference of historical time; the personal or traumatic one; or retrospective visits into the past etc.

Talking about historical time, we first have to position ourselves within it. In other words where are we currently on timeline(s)? To clear it out – should we consider global or local scales, international or national; socio-political or just ...artistic? Not going too far here, we can state that after recent historical period of 1990-ties or of rather clear geographical identity, when it was possible to define the Estonian'ness or the Baltic'ness seemingly easily – we are now facing a rather different, and much more unclear situation. In a way its a good, specially knowing that identity as we knew it so far has turned into identity politics where independent artists have not much to contribute anymore. But still – how could contemporary artists reflect "our times", how are they related to time today? We are surrounded by a strange public that has less-and-less time to go to exhibitions; its said that the whole format of an exhibition is loosing its powers – both because of the lack of time and due to the multitude of internet possibilities of looking the artworks. And secondly, the independence of the exhibition is disturbed by the fact that we are more-and-more incorporated into strange surrogate formations that are called creative industries.

In the current show we have relatively tried to ignore these circumstances. But it has not been possible completely. There is, for instance, a globalist multicultural dimension obvious in this show: "Estonian" photography does not equalize any more with national culture: it includes artists who live, study or just work in the country: in the fields of "Estonian" photography today we have artists from Croatia, Latvia, Armenia, Germany, Spain, Turkey etc. In this, so far national concept we have today count on Australian, French, Austrian, British, Dutch a.o. photographers working on Estonian topics etc. And we have also to count on these (ethnically) Estonian artists who work in other countries. A lot of fruitful confusion indeed. In this exhibition we have therefore included Estonian and non-Estonian artists; adults and infants; experienced artists and beginners etc., etc. In some or another way each of the works on the show relates to the category of time, and summon up the complicated nature of temporal categories such as duration or cyclical time or the nature of revisiting the so called "past" with new eyes.

A number of artists on the show feel that the category of "time" in photography needs a fresh and contemporary interpretation. Toomas Kalve for instance returns into the domain of what was once called "ethnographic" photography ("Fashion photographs from Kanepi") in an ironic way. In his other work – "Back in Paris", presented through fragments in this show – an iconic landmarks such as Arc de Triumphe, Eiffel Tower and Our Lady are "revisited" in similar vain to Eugene Atget. Doing so, Kalve “played tourist” and put his bike bearing the EST sign on his pictures, to substitute, to substitute himself. Young Latvian-Estonian artist Diane Tamane takes even a more ambiguous task. In "Mothers and Daughters" she unites 3 generations on one photograph and doing so tries to surpass the linearity of time and duration. Similar strategy, although more manipulatively, is used on Tiit Joala's "24 years of family" (2010) where the artist uses Adobe Photoshop to cross the physical time with possibilities given to us by contemporary software. Taavi Piibemann on his diptych "Untitled" tries to stop time through cancelling communication. On one image there is an empty billboard with no messages, nothing to see – on the other there is a blind young man who just can't see anything. A question is in the air: if there is no information, what happens to our perception of time then? Kaia Konsap's "Disturbingly beautiful" (Source : Internet) 2012 is dealing with various pathologies of seeing juxtaposing the different errata of sensual perception with the "aesthetic" outlook of the symptoms. Some of the artists in the show address more art historically anchored works. Vallo Kalamees presents his "Curriculum: How to do Beautiful pictures" (2000-2012) in Baldessarian tradtion; and similarly does Peeter Linnap's tableaux vivant "Homo EKA'demicus" (EKA = Estonian Academy of Art) that ironically reproduces weirdly retouched portraits of Estonian artists, art historians, gallery and museum directors who have worked in a declined art educational institution – each portrait also includes a label once fixed to institutions hardware belongings. Visiting the past in archeological way brings into foreground other weird findings too. On Getter Kuusmaa's double portrait "Enn and Helle" 1940/2012 of her relatives the very different materialities of hand-colored photograph and digital technologies meet creating a powerful estrangement of old-and-new technologies.

In addition to professional ways of making photographic images I have added also some non educated productions that help us to test some essential limits/ rules/ standards that define our understandings of how photographs should be made. Theodor Peeter Linnap is exhibiting his very first photograph and the compilation „Mad Photograhs“ (L‘Hommage a Roland Barthes) is composed of various student candidates snapshots for entrance exams at Tartu Art College 1999-2005. Instead of just producing more still photographs some artists have preferred to research the temporal features of pictures through other mediums such as videos and short films. In his annoyingly detailed and prolonged video work "Moving pictures" (2003) Raivo Kelomees shows how complicated and time consuming can be setting up a large group-picture; Sten Eltermaa in his turn uses a found group photograph of his relatives for showing symbolic (and linear) death of the people represented on the photograph. Uku Linnap's infant video makes clear that distinguishing between the still and moving images is highly problematic indeed, specially when being surrounded by computer environs. The middle-generation artist LENIN in his turn exposes the ways to animate almost immobile film noir videoframes in both of his short pieces "My Film" and "Unexpected contrasts" (both 2003). "My film" is a work about Estonia, referring in "no mercy" way to this country as an outskirt of Europe, a province with not much hope for brighter future. An extremely ironic undertone of EU bureaucracy acting in "Estonian way" can be found also in a short TV piece by Peeter Oja and Mart Juur "How to make correct photographs for Estonian passport" (2006). Finally it's perhaps interesting to remember that this exhibition is related to time in one more way – it is not "finished" but open to future alterations – it's more a process than a product.

Куратор Peeter Linnap

Участники

Фотография:

„Mad Photograhs“ (L‘Hommage a Roland Barthes)
Toomas Kalve/ Madis Katz
Peeter Linnap
Vallo Kalamees
Triin Rebane
Getter Kuusmaa
Tiit Joala
Sirje Joala
Kristi Mägi
Diana Tamane
Jelena Jakovlevic
Theodor Peeter Linnap
Sirli Õunap

Видеофотоработы:

LENIN
Sten Eltermaa
Raivo Kelomees
Uku Linnap
Peeter Oja & Mart Juur
Thomas Wattebled
Elodie Bernard


Cross Time
Современная эстонская фотография
31.05 - 23.06.2012
Prospekto galerija
Vilnius, Gedimino 43


Источник: Photography.lt

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