BEYOND

The exhibition compiled by internationally reknown curator Adam Budak is going to foreground a self-reflexive nature of the photographic medium and its current condition - as well as its "conditionality": what makes photography "possible"; what makes it "work"; how photography continuously contributes to the architecture of the image and goes BEYOND.

Share Look at my face: my name is Might Have Been; I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell, thus Edgar Auber phrased his, according to Giorgio Agamben, pretentious dedication on the back of his photograph, given to Marcel Proust in 1893. Appropriated from Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sonnet, „The House of Life", this memorable dedication became the leitmotif of Proust's life, a guideline that hunted the writer, a synonym of love, memory and remembrance, as well as an evidence of Proust's authentic passion for photography. Following the promiscuous life of pictures, the exhibition BEYOND refers to Auber's dedication and considers it as a unique definition of photography which contains reflection upon time and its fragmentation, performance and its exigency as well as a distance and its gesture of separation.

BEYOND (Look at my face: my name is Might Have Been; I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell ) is foregrounding a self-reflexive nature of the photographic medium and its current condition as well as the photography's "conditionality" and "exigency" (what Agamben calls "a demand for redemption", or what he perceives as an agent of the "real that is always in the process of being lost, in order to render it possible once again"). What makes photography "possible"; what makes it "work", being "useful" and acting in a "relational" way; how photography continuously contributes to the architecture of the image and goes BEYOND (it); what does make photography "speak"; what is "gestural" about it; how to go BEYOND the medium or move AROUND while simultaneously remaining within the photographic discourse? BEYOND as an assemblage of photography-based work, first of all, focuses on artistic positions that are concerned with the use(s) of photography as well as those that are interested in the broader notion of the medium in the expanded field, marked by blurred borderlines between other forms of expression and escaping categories, seducing senses, provoking other storylines. Furthermore, the "behavior" of a photographic image is being here analyzed and the photography considered as a spatial practice is in focus. Conditions such as "in-between", "beyond" or "parallel to" and "more than" are essential for this show which concentrates on subversive and critical approaches to image production and the status of photography as a medium, exposed to manipulation and abuse. Artists' usage of an image is illuminating an on-going process of questioning image's ontological stability. Oscillating between appropriation and an original, illusion of a movement and a suspense, flatness and three-dimensionality, it generates a new—non-defined yet—quality of perception that requests spontaneity from a viewer as well as a certain gesture of implied improvisation. In majority of cases, it is a highly performative proposition where the non-existing movement is a movement of a performance in fact.

BEYOND departs from one of the most beautiful ever written essays about photography, "Judgment Day" by Giorgio Agamben (included in his collection of essays, "Profanations") where photography gains a mission of "capturing the Last Judgment": it represents the world as it appears on the last day, the Day of Wrath, when "everything that happens" is called forth, summoned to appear on Judgment Day. Agamben analyses the relationship between gesture and photography. For him, the photograph is always more than an image: "it is the site of a gap, a sublime breach between the sensible and the intelligible, between copy and reality, between a memory and a hope." While embracing the formal and the narrative and acting as an interruption, or a rupture, or a break, this exhibition's ambition is to map such a breach.

BEYOND takes into consideration cross-photographic positions, such as Geoffrey Farmer's image theatrics (installation/sculpture/photography), or Helena Almeida's photographic self-portraiture (performance/drawing/painting/photography), or John Gerrard's animated architecture of vision (video/photography/light box), or Elad Lassry's uncanny subjects' mise en scene (object/film/photography). Other artists of the exhibition, such as Becky Beasley, Haris Epaminonda, Stefan Burger, Alexandre Singh, Banu Cennetoglu, Marlo Pascual, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Iñaki Bonillas, Annette Kelm, Sunah Choi, Miriam Böhm, Tatiana Lecomte, Caroline Heider contribute to the notion of a photography, perceived as a spatial, performative and self-reflexive, post-conceptual practice. The newly produced, site-specific installation by Dénes Ferkes frames and animates the exhibition space, recalling a photographic process of reality's duplication while early films by John Baldessari (including "Art Disaster", 1971 and "Ed Henderson Suggests Sound Tracks for Photographs", 1974) negotiate the photography's form and a meaning.

BEYOND
(Look at my face: my name is Might Have Been; I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell)
Kurator: Adam Budak

Artists: Helena Almeida, John Baldessari, Becky Beasley, Inaki Bonillas, Stefan Burger, Miriam Böhm, Banu Cennetoglu, Sunah Choi, Haris Epaminonda, Denes Farkas, Geoffrey Farmer, John Gerrard, Caroline Heider, Annette Kelm, Elad Lassry, Tatiana Lecomte, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Marlo Pascual, Alexandre Singh