To celebrate the launch of a major new partnership between Format Festival and Lishui International Photography Festival in China, Director of FORMAT, Louise Fedotov-Clements, has curated “Sleight of Hand”, an exhibition presenting work by six artists – Brian Griffin; Regine Petersen; John Angerson; Yvette Monahan and Jan Stradtmann (winner of the first FORMAT/Lishui award 2019), plus Max Pinckers (curated by Tim Clark), at Lishui Art Museum.
The artists in the exhibition each examine belief, control and misdirection through photography by unravelling our understanding of history, landscape and documentary. Each of the series has a story to tell, deeper than the surface level, we encourage our viewers to look for longer, each work offers a revelation, a challenge to our idea of perception or multiple realities through skilful deception, research and layered narratives.
Over the last decade the constantly growing ecology of photography has expanded to encompass a huge number of manifestations, hybrid forms and practices that frequently cross over into many other fields. Since this still emergent practice of contemporary photography, including the discourse and technology of the medium, is under such rapid transformation, it is a challenge to define it. The current contemporary network of hybrid photographic practices coexist and pitch between the exhibition space, audience, publication, the interactive and online. It has become a hyperactive image field that refers to and is made up of endless subjects such as politics, fictions, collage, vernacular images, performance, archives and society as a whole.
Despite the vast developments in digital technologies, photography is still is a ubiquitous tool of representation. There is almost nothing that can’t be shown in a photograph. From the surface of mars to our dinner tables, alongside much more personal, intimate concerns including questions of identity. Alongside this wealth of production, the context for the presentation of images is larger than ever before, with hundreds of opportunities in galleries, books, magazines, apps, open calls, blogs, pop-ups and the list goes on. Each of these voices and images want visibility and are looking for a platform, online, in print or public space. All the while photographers are competing for visibility together with a new generation of hybrid curators and publishers who have emerged, working online, in publishing and galleries, independent, global and nomadic.
The role of human memory has shifted, its new purpose is to record references, therefore entrusting to the archive (mobile, cloud and so on) the responsibility of remembering. This is becoming ever more true, nonetheless some works still hold our attention and burn brightly in our minds. Our collective image memory contains everything from natural disaster, society, war and the private lives of strangers on a micro, global and interstellar scale. Images surround us everywhere, they add to the visual silt that builds up in all directions, from our mobiles, blogs and advertising to vernacular or archives and found photography. This is happening to such a degree that it is hard to determine what is and isn’t important. As Baudrillard relates, in this era of simulation, the real is quickly fading, leaving us behind to become part of layers upon layers of simulations and representations.
The photographic aspect of our life is a primary element of our collective knowledge and even our identity is forged in relation to images, everyone is engaged in photography, we are photographed over 100 times a day on surveillance cameras, we upload images in their billions, comment, like, share, skim and curate in our billions. Ask yourself how many pictures have you been included in, how many have you seen and remembered or absorbed, how many have you activated or produced today? This visual lexicon and image database is a familiar global language, non-verbal and more often than not, digital. Images can be as pure as language, beyond text, they are the representations of our desires, more than real as we project our best, most enviable selves onto the social media platforms. Images are moving beyond a reflection or substitute for reality into being reality itself, equally in our hyper mediated society, we are nearly to the point where only the things that become image are considered real. In this most extraordinary time of transition into the digital realm, the representation of the world begins to almost replace the world itself.
Artists play a crucial role in the development of this closely imagined future between illusion and authenticity, vision and progress, narrative and the future, this age that we are in is a great provocation for artists and they offer us a glimpse of what might be. Far beyond the control of the curator, who attempts to make sense of the fragments of this field, photography has founded an entire world of understanding that encompasses and is mediated by a vast number of relations, concerns and potentials to manifest as one of the most important aspects of our 21st century human condition. Working across a range of practices the artists in this exhibition focus on layers of histories, documented and fictional, whose ambiguous nature can be controlled to trigger shifts in our perception of reality. The photographers in FORMAT : Sleight of Hand offer a compelling opportunity to consider this era of photographic practice through an impressive exploration of narratives, time and place.
The medium of photography is one of the strongest to interrogate, document and transport us away from the important moments of this shifting world that we live in. Often cultural programmes such as photography festivals are the best sites to offer a multidimensional combination of activities that share artists’ voices and visions that reverberate, coalesce and even collide. These constellations of activity interrupt the everyday for audiences and industry and allow for new connections and discoveries to be made that maybe even question our understanding of what has gone before. This is a time of great upheavals but also of details, fragments, misdirection and hybrid realities, fortunately through the eyes of artists we can try to make sense of this state that we are in.
More information:Format Festival Sleight of Hand, special exhibition at Lishui Museum (China)8 November - 12 November 2019formatfestival.comlishuiphoto.org
