| | | | | | | | | Baltensperger + Siepert: from "No Real Body", 2020 © Baltensperger + Siepert | | | | | SITUATIONS / The Right to Look | | | | | | | 29 February – 1 June 2020 | | | | | | | | | | | | | Fotomuseum Winterthur presents the newest cluster The Right to Look as part of its ongoing exhibition format SITUATIONS. The artistic positions by examine the diversity and ambiguity of the various gazes that encounter each other in the photographic image.
The act of seeing is multi-layered: it not only covers visual perception but also includes the processes by which things are made visible and defined and objectified through the gaze of others. In the context of networked, algorithmic image practices, SITUATIONS/The Right to Look reflects on the diversity and ambiguity of the various gazes that encounter each other in the photographic image – in the convergence of technical specifications, interventions by photographers, cultural filters and viewer reception. The increasing globalisation, digitisation and commercialisation of our visual culture have also intensified the potency of the gaze; our modes of looking are interlocked in a complex way, obliging us to address questions of hegemony. Whose interests and what identities and social realities are inscribed in photographic images via the gaze? And who has the right to look (away)? | | | | | | | | | | No Real Body – The Fiction of a Singular Identity, Filmposter, 2020. Links: Filmproduktion in Nigeria © Victoria Akujobi & Bunmi Ajakaiye; Mitte: Filmproduktion in Gaza © Rushdi Al-Sarraj & Ahmed Hassouna; rechts: Filmproduktion in Mynamar © Soe Arkar Htun & Sai Naw Kham | | | SITUATION #195: Baltensperger + Siepert (Stefan Baltensperger, David Siepert, Uwe Lützen) in cooperation with Soe Arkar Htun & Sai Naw Kham, Victoria Akujobi & Bunmi Ajakaiye, and Rushdi Al-Sarraj & Ahmed Hassouna, No Real Body – The Fiction of a Singular Identity, 2020
How would your life have evolved if you had grown up in a different place, influenced by completely different social and political realities? This question is at the heart of the latest work of Baltensperger + Siepert. Taking the duo’s everyday working life as a starting point for a fictional story, they joined forces with screenwriter Uwe Lützen to script an instructional screenplay which was subsequently interpreted and implemented by three different film production companies: one based in Yangon, Myanmar (Soe Arkar Htun & Sai Naw Kham; Kefka Film Productions), one in Lagos, Nigeria (Victoria Akujobi & Bunmi Ajakaiye) and one in Gaza (Rushdi Al-Sarraj & Ahmed Hassouna; Ain Media). The experimental setup spawned three 16-minute feature films based on the same narrative yet shaped in the light of different cultural codes. More than just revealing these codes, however, the complex interweaving of images and imaginaries directs the gaze back at the audience who find themselves confronted with a whole range of questions. Who are the authors of these parallel stories? For which audience were they produced? When Nigerian Nollywood, the second largest site for film production in the world, contributes its perspective – generally meant to target the African continent – to a commission from a Western employer, what reality is staged, what gaze and spectator is imagined? Is there room for artistic exploration in Gaza, a place primarily known as a war zone through media reporting? And what expectations do we as Western Europeans have of the film scene in Myanmar, which after decades of military dictatorship is beginning to open up to the rest of the world? The three-channel installation shown for the first time at Fotomuseum Winterthur creates a form of spectatorship in which the tension of intersecting and entangled gazes becomes palpable. | | | | | | | | | | Ana Teresa Vicente: "Wandering Gaze", 2017–18 © Maria Martins | | | SITUATION #196: Ana Teresa Vicente, Wandering Gaze, 2018
The installation Wandering Gaze by the Portuguese artist Ana Teresa Vicente consists of an X-Y plotter hidden behind a framed photograph to which a magnet has been attached. While looking at the photograph through the viewfinder, the viewer’s gaze is recorded by an eye-tracking system. Inside the box are metal shards, which are then set in motion by the magnet which retraces the recorded pattern of the gaze. What begins as a seemingly innocent act of viewing becomes a destructive gesture, erasing the image over time: The more the image is looked at, the more it vanishes in front of our eyes. The viewers find themselves in a dilemma: not only do they contribute to the destruction of the artwork, but they are also confronted with their own curiosity and voyeurism which put them in this position in the first place. | | | | | | | | | | From Gazeplot, C-print, 2017 © Coralie Vogelaar | | | SITUATION #197: Coralie Vogelaar, Gazeplot, 2017
In Gazeplot, Coralie Vogelaar exposes the relation between human and machinic gaze in the context of online news images. The work builds on the artist’s research to compare the online popularity of images – indexed by Google based on their reproduction rate – with an analysis of the looking behaviour of viewers. Employing eye tracking technology to capture and compare the different gazes of 12 participants exposed to a total of 500 press images, Vogelaar reveals a correlation between the popularity of an image and the gaze’s focus, identifying a heightened attention for certain compositional patterns. As the data would suggest, our looking behaviour is (pre-)constructed by the millions of images we have been exposed to, so that we instinctively search for familiar patterns and visual elements that have informed and trained our gaze. Overlaying heat maps and diagrams on the original image sources to expose the regions of visual interest, Gazeplot reveals a pattern to detect successful and unsuccessful news images. The unsuccessful images are prone to be ignored by both the eye and the indexing algorithm, as Google will display the least successful ones at the very bottom of the image search where they are hardly seen and will eventually be deleted. Gazeplot thus reveals the complicity of human attention and algorithmic visual analysis as they spawn a standardised 'successful' gaze that promotes a uniform image typology. | | | | | | | | | | Visual research on networked activism, screenshot, 2020 © Fotomuseum Winterthur | | | SITUATION #198: Visual Research on Networked Activism
New forms of data circulation have completely altered the distribution of audiovisual materials and fueled the formation and organisation of protest movements. Social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are used as a tool to mobilise and coordinate thousands of protestors. At the same time, images of protest actions – staged or as documentary material – circulate online, catalysing a whole other dimension of the revolution through the digital space. Activist solidarity, but also pure voyeurism and the appropriation by mass media enable these images to spread virally. Their unpreventable circulation allows for counter-narratives that manage to undermine institutional control. Leaked images of state violence or human rights violations are deployed to make un(der)represented voices and viewpoints heard or/and to make acts of injustice, discrimination or surveillance and data abuse visible. Situations that might not have been witnessed before or were even censored can be uncovered with just one upload. Resistance also takes place at the level of code, when hacktivists trick algorithms in order to raise awareness of machine control or aiming to overthrow the power or knowledge monopolies of large (online) corporations. The curatorial team of Fotomuseum Winterthur has gathered visual research on three examples of such online phenomena in their attempt to uncover and undermine control mechanisms of state/corporate/machines by appropriating networked image practices. | | | | | | | | | | | Guanyu Xu: The Living Room, from the series "Temporarily Censored Home", 2018 © Guanyu Xu | | | SITUATION #199: Guanyu Xu, Temporarily Censored Home, 2018–19
Growing up in a conservative, middle-class household in Beijing, queer Chinese artist Guanyu Xu’s photo series Temporarily Censored Home confronts us with the supremacy of heteronormativity and the resulting censorship that determined his youth. Xu’s photographs show four rooms from his parental home, which he re-appropriates by adding self-portraits of himself and other homosexual US-men from his series One Land to Another (2014–), as well as torn pages from film and fashion magazines. By superimposing and dialogically interweaving various motifs in his parental space, Xu silently protests against the limited visibility of the LGBTQIA+-community within China. | | | | | | | | | Leonore Mau
Ohne Titel, 1990
Aus: Priesterinnen
Silbergelatine-Abzug, 39.7 x 29.7 cm
Sammlung Fotomuseum Winterthur, Schenkung George Reinhart
Inv. Nr. 1993-023-004
© Leonore Mau | | | SITUATION #200: Leonore Mau, Case Study from the Collection Fotomuseum Winterthur
As part of the collection of Fotomuseum Winterthur, we are confronted with the gaze of the Condomblé Priestesses captured by the German press photographer Leonore Mau. At first glance, only one thing seems evident: a European is looking at another culture, and this culture is looking back. But what are the specifics of this relationship of the gaze? How is it culturally (in-)formed, and how is it directed and ultimately reflected on by the photographer, the viewers or by a museum?
In displaying the works of Leonore Mau, the curatorial team of Fotomuseum Winterthur confronts its visitors with the following question: What could it look like to revisit one’s collection from a postcolonial perspective? Is it possible to deconstruct the gazes inscribed and at play? Mau’s works gained wide attention mostly in the context of her collaboration with the German writer Hubert Fichte. Fichte’s lyrical texts, accompanied by Mau’s photographs and termed by himself as 'ethnopoetry', have dealt with the question of the representability of the ‘other’ from early on. Meanwhile, they have come to be considered as precursors of queer and postcolonial studies.
From 1969, Mau and Fichte travelled to Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, capturing rituals and festivities both in photography and in writing. Mau used the camera to become a participant in foreign cultural practices without subjecting the scenes to meticulous investigation. Not only the negotiation of the gaze, but also the motif of testimony and claim of authorship are forces at play in her series Priesterinnen (Priestesses, 1990) and Grosse Anatomie (Great Anatomy, 1977). Who is looking at whom? Who controls the photograph? Where do the gazes in image and writing– the perspectives of Mau and Fichte – meet, challenge or complement each other? And how do we position ourselves, here in the museum space, with the gazes of the priestesses directed at us – and being confronted with a scene in which our position as viewers is not clearly defined? | | | | | | | SITUATIONS is an experimental exhibition format that reacts dynamically to current photographic and cultural developments. A SITUATION may take the form of a photographic image, a video or a performance, an essay or quote aimed at an in-depth exploration of a topic. Numbered consecutively, SITUATIONS are presented as thematic clusters in the physical space and online at situations.fotomuseum.ch. | | | | | | unsubscribe here
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