Artist Feature

Every week an artist is featured whose single image was published by Der Greif. The Feature shows the image in the original context of the series.

September last year I collaborated with Swiss based photographer Alex Withey to put together an exhibition called “Dislocations”. The selection was based on the books we recently had produced, and was exhibited in Pep + No Name Gallerie in Basel. I carefully selected the eight photographs that work together like a stanza. It was important that the sequence had a dialogue, that the first image connect to the next and so on. From the press release: Both Nina Hove and Alex Withey employ a documentary style not in the service of realistic description, but rather dislocating fragments of places, objects and peoples, suspended moments in time, removing them from their own contexts and realities to be placed in a virtual space where they assume a pungent richness of meaning of their own. This ‘space’ where these images then circulate is one that is beyond and above the specific context where the photographs were taken, instead, it transcends those and allows their content to expand into an allegorical dimension of the human existence as a whole. Be it photographs of photographs that slip into abstraction, blurry still live that feels like it is blooming out of the frame, bits of concrete or human hair turned into painterly shapes and textures that suck the viewer into them, sweaty, bloated skin pulsating before our eyes... Human condition in all its strength and fragility, violence and poetry, is running and dripping throughout both the artists’ work. What at first produces the feeling of peeking into, thus invading, someone else’s memories slowly starts reverberating in a more universal way to the point where we are no longer sure if those memories are not actually our own. Culture and identity punctuate the works throughout, while a constellation of self and Other melt and merge. All these layers and points in this net connect and combine in a variety of ways simultaneously composing a history that is not of a particular time or place, it rather condenses pre-modern, modern and post-modern and is non-specific par excellence at the same time dialoguing and opposing the emptiness of Auge’s concept of non-place, though clearly and very importantly circulating between notions of authenticity and commodity. At the same time that Hove and Withey successfully escape documentary photography, in its inherent pretension and insufficiency, they achieve what is de facto an accurate and possible a visual imagery portrait of human existence, its memories and spaces in a globalized era: an anti-linear, interconnected and abysmal one.