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Storie Adeane – Headean Stories by Elisa Strinna is an artificial landscape animated by cables, pipes and ceramic sculptures that cross walls and ground without interruption. The elements of this ecosystem seem to put two dimensions in communication, one visible, that of the viewer, and one that is not evident, hidden, underground. The cables, the […]
What we know about the world has been delivered to us through media, and for at least the last five or six years, the smartphone is the foremost among them. What Lilly Lulay is interested in analyzing is the way in which our smartphone has changed our approach to images and the consequences on the […]
Merch Mulch (2017) records an exploration inside an abandoned, semi-destroyed shopping center, in an atmosphere that closely resembles the settings of war videogames. A characteristic of the aesthetics of the video game is also the frontal view with which the space is shown, the post-apocalyptic atmosphere created by neon lights, an alienating musical background, the […]
Kurasoushchyna, my love is a declaration of love of one’s roots. Kurasoushchyna is one of the dormitory districts of the city of Minsk, where Masha Svyatogor was born and raised. Like all the suburbs, Kurasoushchyna is an anonymous place, homologated to the Soviet popular housing standard, grey, kilometres of concrete on kilometres of concrete. As […]
ED3N Temple is a hymn to the sacredness of the body and an invitation to both URL and IRL care practices. During the performance, the artist dedicates herself to meditation and yoga exercises inside a room covered in wood, illuminated by ultraviolet lights and full of orchids, phosphorescent phone covers and white towels. From time to […]
In My Desktop Decor * Relaxing * Molly Soda treats her desktop as one of the rooms in her house: while streaming from her actual webcam at home, she shares with the viewer all the steps of the renovation, that is approached as if it was a bedroom redecoration, with images of bedside succulents, a new funny […]
Tianzhuo Chen’s videos are real digital narratives based on solid technological architectures. Chen’s works include motifs and settings typical of virtual and 3D compositions, they build impactful scenes with disturbing characters that narrate dystopian scenes of our society. Chen orchestrates complex multimedia architectures, choral performances composed of fluorescent colours, masks, costumes and sounds. His videos […]
Trevor Paglen’s Octopus is an observation point from which to analyze the displacement that involves now our faculties of visions. Octopus is an apparatus, literally a digital a set of equipment, the artist uses to show us how easily we gravitate towards images. As part of his ‘Bloom’ show at Pace Gallery, London, Paglen places throughout the […]
Oscillation and metamorphosis are the track on which Kenta Cobayashi fights every convention on the fixity of photography. The artist appropriates the photographic medium to demonstrate the density and depth of the digital: Cobayashi’s actions, the ‘clicks’, on the surface of the image give body to otherwise immaterial concepts such as time and space. The […]
In the analysis of what Internet-based art represents, there are three characteristics that appear most evident: the performativity of the medium, the freedom to choose to act in this specific context, the participation of the viewer, who is also the user. For This Unjust Mirror, Consant Dullaart creates hundreds of fake Instagram accounts, and then […]
Through the analysis of a vast and multifaceted visual archive, Kuijpers observed how in the narration of some contemporary events the psychic phenomenon of anxiety, social anxiety in particular, finds online the possibility of growing deliriously up to moment in which it breaks into offline reality, influencing the ways of representing and communicating the concept […]
Inconscio Idraulico is an artwork in progress. It is one of the sections of the Archivio Idraulico, an open photographic and video project built over years of research. Inconscio Idraulico is a project created by stitching together video fragments that come from actual video inspections of pipes, ducts and flues made by a plumber operating […]
Giovanna Petrocchi’s work reconfigures the terms of anthropological research to rethink the definitions of archive, catalogue and collection. Inspired by taxonomies adopted in collections of ancient art in Western museums, Petrocchi weasels her way into their timelines, tampering with sources, materials and stories, setting up these finds into new archaeological narratives. Through the appropriation of […]
Tokyo, a city of cyclic metabolism, sustained by its never-ending scrap and build. In 2018 Koyama launched his personal project, PHASE TRANS, through which he has continued to unfold works from his database of photographs capturing the ever-changing city by the employment of several varying methods. Revive is a series of resurrected images. The images, […]
A Crowded Apocalypse is a video and a series of photographs that document a complex operation, with deliberately surreal features. IO COSE, starting as they often do from the analysis of the relationship between man and technology, have resorted to Mechanical Turk, a platform devised by Amazon, which allows the crowd work force to be […]
One of the myths surrounding the Apollo Moon Landings is their supposed construction. That the giant leap for mankind was a well-polished hoax on the back of NASA and other organisations is a familiar line: one that permeates conspiracy theories across the planet. So perhaps it is not so strange that within any context of […]
SLENDER TIME by Marinella Paderni Things live a time of their own, dissimilar to human time, a slender time made up of minimal particles, elementary traces of its existing, deposits of a silent memory that doesn’t follow the course of History – the memory of cosmic physics and its agents which are repeated to infinity […]
Christto & Andrew have made their mark with images of a surreal nature, between dream and social criticism, on a borderline with the oneiric, dominated by bright and brilliant shades. Their images, always perfect, are the fruit of a unique creation, of a lively intelligence, capable of planning and realising an elaborate and captivating story for every photograph, just as in every […]
I would add that today it is virtually impossible to talk about anything without talking about numbers; we believe – often if not always – that the numbers can help us to understand, and obviously most of us have to believe in something for not losing the reason. We have codified the image and colour (as well […]
After the breakdown in relations with the USSR, in 1963 the Albanian military navy, obsessed by the fear of possible attacks to be launched at sea, crushed a Mediterranean sperm whale, confusing it with an enemy submarine. The animal was recovered and its skeleton housed inside the Museum of Natural History of Tirana, where it is still visible. The […]
From the past to modern times, both archeological research and modern aerial surveillance systems show that the areas of war in the Middle East have always been depicted as empty and nefarious. In particular, the media coverage during the Gulf War provided a series of images of hostile locations with no history and no people. Shadow Sites […]
An artist, at the beginning of his career, is often a redbreast. Most of the time he can be noticed alone and still, focused in defining the limits of his space and research. His energy, steady and inflexible, sparks around him diverting the flow of particles in the air; its chest seems to crumble and […]
“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?” Surveillance Chess is a performance for a single and unusual recipient: the security staff’s surveillance monitor in its control position. Equipped with an interfering transmitter, the collective !Mediengruppe Bitnik hacks surveillance cameras in pre-Olympic London and illegaly assumes control, […]
The data we get from the online search engines are just a small part of the huge amount that populates the web. The project The Iceberg inspects the structure of internet, analysing in particular the deep web, where encrypted, illegal contents are shared and are kept invisible to Google’s search. The deep web is an […]
Dying Birds by Trine Søndergaard and Nicolai Howalt is a series of photographs on birds shot by hunters. The black and white images, often so blurry to make the shape of the animal least visible, don’t stay on particularly cruel and bloody details. The passing moment is though treated with extreme delicacy, with a poetic effort in […]
Everyone has something to share, but where does anything that has posted goes through the modern techological devices? What is the destiny of the Flusser’s ‘technoimages’? Giovanni Fredi is a young artist that decided to collect and appropriate, without asking any authorization neither to the interested subjects, nor to the effective devices’ owners, of the […]
The title of Massimiliano Gatti’s project was inspired by a recurrent expression in Pier Paolo Pasolini writings: in the essays I nomi o il grido della rana or in Se la pittura odierna potesse stimarsi di un genere poetico, the analogy between the dry and infertile desertic landscape and the existential human condition, often appears . Compared to the infinite shades […]
Il capo is one of the episode, together with Da Vinci (2012) and Piattaforma Luna (2011), of the trilogy The Malady of Iron, with which Yuri Ancarani reflects on the work dimension, telling realities usually hidden or poorly visible in the everyday life. In the video all the attention is focused on the head (chief) of the marble […]
“Anyone (…) is seen, but does not see; object of an information, never subject of a communication”. In these words is summarized the Panopticon idea, an ideal IIXth-century prison in which on only one only attendant is in charged of observing all the prisoners without making them conscious of the control action. Hasan Elahi seems to […]
An aphorism by the british writer Arthur C. Clarke in the essay of 1973 ‘Profiles of the future‘ states: «…any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic». Automagic by Anouk Kruithof is a reflection on the possibilities expressed by the technological media in creating suggestions not ascribable to the rational context. Kruithof gleans from his personal archive a collection of photography made […]
In 1946, as part of a famous essay, Orwell wrote that “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness”. Roughly sixty years after, during the Memorial Day weekend, the words “Existence or nonexistence” suddenly appear in Manhattan sky, quickly captured and uploaded on social media by random witnesses of the events, […]
The work The End [Action #5] by Andrea Galvani is part of a wider research, named The End Trilogy (2013-2016), that aims to enrich the experience of physical rules that govern reality, in the effort of re-define the thin boundary between visible and invisible. The video, reproduced through a golden macbook placed on a cement base, is […]
An exercise of portraiture, after the collaboration between Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno for ‘Zidande : a 21st Century Portrait’, k.364 depicts the hidden history of a musical pièce. It runs along the trip made by Avril Levitan and Roi Shiloach – two Israeli musicians of Polish descent – while they are coming back to the land their […]
There is still a long road ahead for the democratic promise of digital revolution and, like any other landmark change, it still has some dead zones. Christopher Baker’s videoinstallation, composed by more than 5,000 videos taken from online platforms such as YouTube or Facebook, reflects on this topic. All the videos are put together on […]
In Eric Baudelaire’s video [Sic.], a woman in a bookshop in Kyoto is reviewing all the items just delivered, censoring, title after title, all the details that cannot be seen. The technique used is called bokashi, which implies that, by using a bisturi, everything that can cause sexual excitement in the viewer is scratched and deleted […]
Pablo Bronstein, by using technical sketches that are the result of his studies in architecture, reflects on the principles of architectural design through history and on the power of large-scale planning for big projects. Every drawing, map or section realised by the artist are separated from their original function and the result seems to challenge […]
“They could easily be my stolen moments, yet I want to see more”. The Others is a slideshow including around 10,000 photographs, taken from different computers whose users were completely unaware of these being used. The images are projected with songs, as a soundtrack, that were taken from the same devices. From the technical point […]
Photographs, video, archival documents and audio recordings compose Martin Errichiello and Filippo Menichetti’s narration. The tale in the work In Quarta Persona (In Fourth Person) is told by different voices, aiming to retrace the recent events of Italian history. In particular, they are mapping the territory of Calabria region alongside the A3 Salerno-Reggio Calabria highway. […]
The book Illustrated People was realised by French artist Thomas Mailaender during a residency at the Archive of Modern Conflict, in London, publisher that is acquiring a huge number of photographs with the aim of representing conflict. His pages alternate the black and white reproduction of some images taken from the archive and the images […]
The relationship between vision and knowledge has never been as unstable and ambiguous as it is today. In the project Limit Telephotography, Trevor Paglen presents a series of distorted pictures, confused and abstracted; these represent secret military facilities that are displaced in remote areas of the United States, mostly invisible to the naked eye. In […]
The work realised by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin in 2008, during a period spent in Afghanistan together with some British military units, is very different from the kind of photojournalism that is usually known. In this case, the two artists entrusted the soldiers with a lightproof box containing a roll of photosensitive paper, thus […]
The first images that naturally come to mind when we think about Austria are its monumental mountain ranges. In Thomas Albdorf’s photographies, however, the Alpes are just a pretext, a screen, a two-dimensional surface that serves as the background for other elements. In the project I Know I Will See What I Have Seen Before, […]
A series of pink gloves focuses the spectators’ attention on seven pedestals with no sculptures. The gloves are worn by a team of performers who accurately describe the invisible shapes and let us perceive a specific image: a sculpture that is already part of our memory and emerges little by little in our mind. […]
If digital manipulation determined a loss in the credibility of the photographic medium, in some cases the opposite tendency can be noticed. After London’s disorders of 2011, the metropolitan police distributed a series of leaflets with low-resolution images of alleged criminals taken from CCTV cameras: these pictures immediately became proof of these people’s guilt, as […]
Light of God is an attempt to provide a visual equivalent to what the drone operator of Omer Fast’s Five Thousand Feet is the Best provides as ‘light of God’. It is a ray of laser light used in Afghanistan and in Iraq to aim the target for a missile, which is visible only with […]
In No. 235 / Encyclopaedia of an Allotment, Anne Geene reflects on the contemporary trend of photography to focus on the smaller details (rather than on the overall view) of the phenomena under analysis. The title of the project refers to a small lot of land in the outskirts of Rotterdam, one of the most […]
In 1749, John Rocque realised a formidable mapping oft he city of London by combining the most traditional techniques for topographic survey with experimental ways of measuring the space. In 2010, Sohei Nishino walks through the streets of the English capital, accumulating a number of pictures in order to create his own map oft he […]
Hidden Islam is an accurate map of the temporary houses of prayer that the Muslim population improvised in Northern Italy to deal with the difficulties of getting official permissions due to the adverse political situation. The author, Nicolò Degiorgis, inspects these spaces from two points of view, which are mirrored also in the publication: black […]
Antonio Ottomanelli, attentive towards the dynamics between the individual and the public space, in Big Eye Kabul raises his gaze. In his pictures, he shows the dirigibles used by the US army to control the occupied territories. In this overturned gaze, who usually observes is now observed, and in this momentary role reversal is possible […]
Penn Hills Resort, Pennsylvania. A sense of sweetened anachronism emanates from the images of Juno Calypso’s series The Honeymoon. Joyce, the artist’s alter ego, is immersed in the solitude of the hotel room – a place mainly frequented by couples during their romantic vacations. Surrounded by outmoded furniture and soft coloured wallpapers, the young woman […]
Daisuke Yokota has presented the serie ‘Matter‘ to the public as an immense installation using 100,000 photographic prints, emphasizing the texture and materiality of photograph surfaces by mass-printing images from photo books and ordinary life on rolls of paper and solidifying them in wax. ‘MATTER / BURN OUT’ is an extension of the work series ‘Matter’ […]
Compleanno (Birthday) is a diary for images that the artist Marilisa Cosello has imagined as description of her multiple personality, finding five characters that represent five different people living inside her, telling the origin, the present and the future of herself : The Bride, The Lover, The Man, The bourgeois woman, The Two Children. Birthday is the day […]
“Some time ago, browsing through old photographs in a flea market, two group portraits caught my eye. Of the eight women in the first photo, six appeared in the other photo as well. I recognized them from their faces not their dresses, which were different. No clue as to what photo was shot first. On the reverse […]
South-African artist Mohau Modisakeng uses self-portrait, in the forms of photogrpahy, video and performace, to propose his own reflections on the imagery that surrounding the black body, particularly the South-African one. A body that is inevitably connected to the ideas of violence and linked to the crimes of apartheid and racial segregation that was in […]
From 2013 Marco Signorini has been working on the potential power of digital technology, driving his research into the fertile land of a new reality that performs the universe we inhabit. His method, tranfert from the computer, considers the digital as a constitutive part of the image. As in the combining game of the anagram, […]
Nurtured by emotions and feelings such intimate than can’t find suitable words, Manon Wertenbroek‘ work literally creates, models the images through a material and multi-layered intervention, where clay and paper become sperimental medium and the space could be concurrently lived and perceived. In this necessity of gift back a materiality to the inner energy, the sculpture acts a vital […]
Rain is one of the most recent projects by Japanese artist Yoshinori Mizutani, that shows the streets of Tokyo from a totally new point of view. Characterized by strong contrasts of the colours of the objects in the images, like umbrellas or cars, and the alternation of blacks and white of the zebra crossings, which […]
The experience in advertising of artist Dominic Hawgood, who now lives and works in London, is at the origin of his construction of images. Using a similar language in terms of light, digital manipulation and post-production, Hawgood aims to inspect the limits of perceptions, the spiritual/religious ecstasy, and the alterations of the mental status of […]
“I thought it would be relevant to ironically use photography to convey absence – a media often, and almost automatically used to reframe memory. The whole point of the project was to maintain the idea of a ‘hole’ in the picture, symbolizing the hole in the family. Using pictures of a family without a dad on […]
“The modern spirit is vivisective. Vivisection itself is the most modern process one can conceive. The ancient spirit accepted phenomena with bad grace. The ancient method investigated law with the lantern of justice, morality with the lantern of revelation, art with the lantern of tradition. But all these lanterns have magical properties: they transform and […]
The work of the artists Christto & Andrew, born respectively in Puerto Rico and in South Africa, deal with the topics of national identity and history of a specific place. In particular, they take their inspiration from Doha, the city in Qatar where they currently live, which in a few decades witnessed a quick growth […]
Felicity Hammond is a young british photographer, that for many years has been dealing with photography in a broader sense, experimenting surfaces, matters and print on various materials. In the project ‘ The Language of Living ‘, composed by a wide range of expressions – from installation to performance – the artist has appropriated the digitally rendered architectural propositions […]
Discipula collective, through this body of works – that is more conceived as on operation than a single work itself – becomes part of the dialogue dealing with the valuable side of the images and how memory and the usage of intangible data could be preserved. From a source-image, in specific from the render of […]
These flowers sat between powerful men as they signed agreements designed to influence the fate of the world. (Taryn Simon) This series by the american artist Taryn Simon has been presented in various occasions and different shapes: as photographic project, as a series of sculpture and as an artist book, edit by Hatje Cantz. The […]
The photographer Laurence Rasti was born from Iranian parents, but lives and works in Switzerland. Inspired by her double nationality, her work reflects on topics such as identity, social belonging, and gender. There Are No Homosexuals in Iran, in particular, is a reflection on homosexuality in her country of origin. The title of the project directly […]
After a career in the graphic design, the Canadian artist Sara Cwynar experiments now with photography, installation and collage, techniques that allow her to obsessively accumulate images taken from the pop culture – which she defines ‘vernacular’ – and successively to modify, merge them with other materials, and reinvent them in new compositions. The works […]
Niagara is a series realised by the American photographer Alec Soth between 2004 and 2006. The project is composed by pictures of the area surrounding the well-known waterfall. Millions of tourists visit this location every year, and this phenomenon led to the formation of a major number of motels and facilities dedicated mainly to those […]
Created after the Onna no Shashin (Female Photography) big wave that started in the 90s in Japan, in which an increasingly growing number of women photographers started appearing on the art scene, Tokyo Rumando’s self portraits claim back […]
The works of Excellences & Perfections by Amalia Ulman, which have been recently included in the shows Performing for the Camera at Tate Modern and Electronic Superhighway at Whitechapel Gallery in London, seem to offer an answer to the question: ‘how can performance art change in the era of major spread of internet and social […]