Kamikaze
dal 23/7/2002 al 3/8/2002
Segnalato da
Kerim Aytac
Justin Coombes
Shun-Lung Chung
Katy Dawkins
Joe Duggan
Sarah Evans
Marc Goodwin
Patrick Kelly
Ilona Karwinska
Hala El Koussy
Francisco Lopez
Evi Peroulaki
Urzula Rapacka
Tomas Stargardter
Doris Vanistendael
Douglas White
23/7/2002
Kamikaze
Century Gallery, London
The sixteen artists in Kamikaze play deftly with photography, video, and film. Making serious points flippantly, joking with straight faces, satirizing their subjects without lapsing into irony. Concerns include nature, language, travel, paradise and death. Kamikaze pilots takes their ideas to dangerously logical conclusions...
Kerim Aytac, Justin Coombes, Shun-Lung Chung, Katy Dawkins, Joe Duggan, Sarah Evans,
Marc Goodwin, Patrick Kelly, Ilona Karwinska, Hala El Koussy, Francisco Lopez, Evi Peroulaki,
Urzula Rapacka, Tomas Stargardter, Doris Vanistendael, Douglas White
photographic, digital, and time-based media
The sixteen artists in KAMIKAZE play deftly
with photography, video, and film.
Making serious points flippantly, joking with straight faces, satirizing their
subjects without lapsing into irony. Concerns include nature, language,
travel, paradise and death. KAMIKAZE pilots takes their ideas to
dangerously logical conclusions...
The group is made up of recent graduates in photography from courses at
Goldsmiths, Westminster, and the RCA. All work is very much for sale.
In Douglas White's digitally manipulated photographs, natural forms take on
supernatural connotations. Using similar tactics, Francisco Lopez's playful,
anti-humanist films and Sarah Evans' backlit colour transparencies examine the
increasingly fraught and complex relationship between humanity and nature.
Doris Vanistendael isn't so worried. Her videos and prints use the modernist grid
to gaze impassively at planes drifting through a clear blue sky or a rustling
canopy of horse-chestnut leaves.
Patrick Kelly and Joe Duggan both use colour photography to depict their own
contemporary utopias. But the viewer might not feel as comfortable as the
pictures' protagonists appear to be in these self-enclosed visions of paradise.
Shun-Lung Chung and Justin Coombes create dystopic visions of the city.
Chung punctuates his seductive, large-format urban pastorals with morbid,
unexpected details. Coombes tells a photo-story in which a phantom's attempts
to revitalise an inner-city wasteland are doomed to failure.
Katy Dawkins' posters place graffiti into an authoritative arena, exploring the
contrast between 'official' and 'unofficial' language. Marc Goodwin's digital
collages reverse the move, blending corporate jargon, sweet wrappers and
architectural photography to mimic and undermine the vacuity of advertising.
Hala El Koussy makes a more personal play with language; her minimalist videos
explore the problems and poetics of everyday communication.
Kerim Aytac subverts the Magnum tradition of street photography, using high
contrast subjects and extreme perspectives to create monochrome abstractions;
ghosts of street life. Evi Peroulaki's lush colour pictures have the opposite
effect, elevating and aestheticizing the detritus of the urban sprawl; a crushed
Coke can; a banana. Ilona Karwinska, Urzula Rapacka, and Tomas
Stargardter use photography to put sophisticated spins on well-established
modes of portraiture. Karwinska delicately depicts the intimacy of friendship.
Rapacka uses the soft toys up for grabs in an archaic amusement arcade game
as cyphers to explore innocent and horrific memories of childhood. Stargardter
finds the exotic in subjects as diverse as patron saint celebrations in Nicaragua
and body piercing in Brighton.
Note: The exhibition is spread between Century and Mafuji Galleries, at either end
of Kingsland Road.
Image: a work by Marc Goodwin
Weds - Sat, 1-5pm | also at Mafuji Gallery
Private View: Wednesday July 24, 6:30-8:30pm
Century Gallery
ACAVA, 1-15 Cremer Street, Shoreditch, London E2 8HD
contemporary fine art in an artist-run gallery