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11/3/2015

The Visual Paradigm

Camera Austria, Graz

Landscapes are never simply there. Landscapes are always an expression of relationships. Landscape is a social covenant, a convention. In this nexus of relations and conventions, photographs play a central role. If landscape always represents a combination of aesthetic, social, economic, symbolic, and spatial elements, and photography “serves as a kind of relay connecting theories of art, language, and the mind with conceptions of social, cultural, and political value” (W. J. T. Mitchell), then a complex articulation of culture arises at the junction between landscape and photography: both associate that history with this view, that text with this identity, that memory with this place, that place with this history. Both landscape and photography embody a space where differences are yielded; both are linked to identity, memory, knowledge, history, and experience and provide a stage for related inscriptions.

Against this backdrop, the exhibition series “Disputed Landscape” queries current photographic positions as to how they convey or make visible these articulations in pictures. Some of the invited artists work in areas that are or have been marked by military or national conflict, ranging from Tibet to the Middle East, from Africa to Ireland, with an aim to expose their forensic and symbolic traces (“Uncovering History”); others explore the fiction of landscape, historical photographic dispositifs, or the documentary conflict with a view to representation (“The Visual Paradigm”); and still others focus on the temporal, spatial, corporeal, and pictorial constructions of landscape (“Enacting Landscape”). Common to all projects appears to be the fact that the photographs produced in the process are themselves permeated by conflicts and ruptures, that they challenge existing articulations of those ideologies by way of these representations. Is it even possible to reconstruct (conflicting) histories like those inscribed in landscapes? And if so, in which ways? How are these histories staged in image form, themselves being characterised by the suppression of visibility, a suppression that is so often compounded and ingrained by a suppression of (other) histories? Which facets of historical formations can be exposed, which aspects of things and words, vision and speech, content and expression? Against this background, the exhibition project opens up an arena for coming to terms with articulations, a pursuit that ultimately infuses all of the pictures themselves.

About the artist:

Stephanie Kiwitt
In her project “Wondelgemse Meersen” (2012), Stephanie Kiwitt (born 1972 in Bonn, lives in Brussels) photographed a wasteland to the north of the Belgian city of Ghent. The area, which encompasses around 100 hectares, was originally a marshland and is today surrounded by transport routes, commercial and housing zones, and empty industrial buildings. Kiwitt meticulously documents this semi-urban area through countless photographs, which in the eponymous book are generally arranged in grids and are only occasionally interrupted by full-page spreads. The images feature an untold number of details, yet without ever providing an overview of the landscape itself. It seems to be a way of visually probing, testing, exploring—culture and nature collide in the seemingly cut-out pictures, with allusions to various utilisations, though only fragmentary and without context. The area itself remains inaccessible and unidentified, showing how the artist impressively documents the actual limits of documentation.

Christian Mayer
In a piece from the year 2011, Christian Mayer (born 1976 in Sigmaringen, lives in Vienna) thematises the story of a National Geographic Society expedition that took place in Basin State Park, Utah, in 1949: “Escalante Expedition Named This Glowing Valley ‘Koda-chrome Flat’”. Image panels freely positioned in space or leaned against the wall display enlarged original photographs and the related captions, translating a certain history of seeing and its photographic representation into an installative arrangement that lends emphasis to the artificiality of the endeavour. With this group of works, Mayer makes clear that the perception of landscape is very closely connected to the cultural techniques of recording, representing, processing, and also archiving it. As such, vision itself has a history and is linked to specific materialities. Mayer brings up to date imaging technology that is no longer available: the production of the Kodak colour film that in the 1940s gave photography its new role as the guiding visual medium was stopped in 2011. This allows the artist to highlight those aspects and methods that are determinative for the visualisation and archivisation of reality, and especially of landscape.

Ricarda Roggan
The work of Ricarda Roggan (born 1972 in Dresden, lives in Leipzig) is characterised by a fundamental control of the photographic image. It determines, through complex arrangements, the way in which we are able to see something. Yet the term intervention better lends itself to describing this working approach than the term staging. This method is even continued when encountering nature and landscape. In the series “Baumstücke” (Treescape, since 2007), the artist prunes the foliage and branches of the depicted tree groups until they meet her own visual specifications. For the series “Sedimente” (Sediments, since 2008), photographed in rock quarries, she rearranges the strata of rock in the foreground. Eliminated in the process are dramatic or attention-drawing details in particular. This gives rise to impermeable disclosures, just as exemplary as they are enigmatic and placeless. Contrasting approaches like documentation and construction, reality and model, which attain clarity through their methods, likewise underscore the power of defining the visual through the perception of landscape.

Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch
In many of their series, Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch (born 1971 in Vöcklabruck and 1968 in Friesach, live in Vienna) engage with the modern paradigm of discovering and surveying the world. They translate the spatial aspects of these conquests into systems of representation that are characterised by conceptual methods, thus placing them in a relationship of tension with the (photographic) image. In the series “Die Innere Grenze/Notranja meja” (The Inner Border, 2008), the artists use historical maps to help them trace the former border between Austria and the “SHS State” (Kingdom of Serbs, Croatians, and Slovenes), which made a claim to parts of what is today Carinthia after the First World War. In 1920, approximately 60 per cent of the population living there voted through a national referendum to remain Austrian. Created according to a predefined cartographic grid, pictures of seventy-four sites show the various landscapes along this historical boundary line. Questions pertaining to the possibilities of reconstruction and documentation are associated with questions of the political meaning of landscape.

Image: Christian Mayer, Escalante Expedition Named This Glowing Valley

Press Contact:
Angelika Maierhoefer, exhibition@camera-austria.at

Opening: 12.3.2015, 7 pm

Camera Austria
Lendkai 1
Graz

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