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10/10/2011

Douglas White and Dora Fobert

Paradise Row, London

Douglas White - New Skin for an Old Ceremony

"While traveling in East Africa in 2001 I came across the remains of an elephant. There was little left as it had been mostly scavenged. All that remained were a scattered arrangement of bones and its vast deflated skin, draped and folded like a collapsed tent.

The image of that scene has always stayed with me. It was a visceral encounter. Here was a body become landscape, a body both present and absent in which the distinction between the inner and outer had evaporated in the heat and decay. It was a body you could walk through.

I've always worked with material that was discarded or overlooked. But of all those objects that I ever encountered, this is the one I wanted most to possess, though how and in what way, I could never define or understand. It was, of course, a found object that was impossible to retrieve and probably for that reason, this dead and distant form has haunted me since. Shades and echoes of it have instead emerged elsewhere my work, in assembled hunks of trees that resembled parts of an elephant or the draped, melted skin of a vandalized plastic bin and most recently while I was building clay walls for a cast... As I worked a rolled-out slab of clay it begin to crease and crack and it became, in my mind's eye, elephant skin... After so long I felt, at least in part, able to recuperate something of this strange, lost encounter and of the unreasoned desire for this abject form".

Douglas White

"New Skin for an Old Ceremony" is Douglas White's third solo show at Paradise Row.

White is a sculptor whose work is and is about, transformation, the transformation of materials, transformed states of being and the transformative potential of objects.

He works with the discarded and the lost / both materially and mnemonically / seeking / through the alchemy of the creative act / to recuperate value and perhaps to fix in the material form of his work / for a while at least / time and memory / an exorcism incarnate.

In this exhibition White presents a series of large sculptures formed of expanses of skin-like, manipulated clay.

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Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin present Dora Fobert

Paradise Row announces the first exhibition in its new Project Space, located within its London gallery.

'Dora Fobert presented by Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin' showcases a series of historically important images taken by the young photographer Dora Fobert (1925-1943), in the Warsaw Ghetto, in the summer of 1942.

At that time Forbert was assisting Jakub Boim the official ghetto photographer. In an initiative of her own, however, she began to take the series of portraits of women living in the ghetto that are presented here. Simply shot, each nude study is an intimate and personal record of an individual living in the most extreme of circumstances. Collectively, the photographs take on a further meaning, being a subtle act of resistance against the malevolent objectification and eroticisation of Jewish women in the Nazi mind-set. Against the perceived natural beauty of the Aryan female the Nazi imagination set the figure of the 'adorned Jewess' - decadent and adept in the deceptive and seductive arts of fashion and make-up.

Because of the limited supply of photographic chemicals at Fobert's disposal, the photographs were never properly fixed and remain unstable under natural light. Accordingly the works are presented behind red glass.

Fobert was deported to Treblinka in August 1942.

These photographs were saved by Adela K, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Recently discovered, the photographs were first shown as a part of Alias, Krakow Photomonth 2011, curated by Broomberg and Chanarin and are shown here for the first time in the UK.

Image: Dora Fobert: ALIAS, from the archive of Adela K., Ca 1942, 2011
fibre based paper negative, 25 x 20 cm

Opening: 11 October 2011 - 18:30

Paradise Row
74 Newman Street - W1T 3EL London
Opening Hours: Mon-Fri 10 am - 6 pm, Thur 10 am - 8 pm, Sat 11 am - 6 pm

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