NEWSExhibitions, Lectures, Talks

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New and Upcoming ExhibitionsVertigo - Video Scenarios of Rapid Changes
Fondazione MAST Bologna, til 30 June 2024

1/15

The Muations of Society in Video Art.

Change of Work, of Production, of Behaviour, Change of Communication,
of Environment, and of the Social System

With:
Lucy Beech, Will Benedict, Wang Bing, Douwe Dijkstra, DIS, Chen Chieh-Jen, Cao Fei, Nina Fischer/Maroan el Sani, Melanie Gilligan, Simon Gush, Lauren Huret, Sven Johne, Kaya & Blank, Ali Kazma, Dominique Koch, Gabriela Löffel, Ariane Loze, Eva & Franco Mattes, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Richard Mosse, Pauline Oltheten, Stefan Panhans/Andrea Winkler, Julika Rudelius, Pilvi Takala and      Anna Witt

New PublicationsAndreas Gursky - Visual Spaces of Today

1/4

New Essays

1/13

Andreas Gursky

Paco Carrascosa

Paco Carrascosa

Paco Carrascosa

Paco Carrascosa

Dongkyun Vak

JH Engström

Pierre-Phillipe Hofmann

Frank van der Salm

Hendrik Spohler

Anna Stüdeli: Primal

Jitka Hanzlóva: Water

Richard Mosse

 

Pouvoir et souffrance, in: Yann Mingard: Les Indociles, GwinZegal 2023
Macht und Schmerz (zu: Yann Mingard: Les Indociles, GwinZegal 2023)

Andreas Gursky - Visual Spaces of Today (2023)

Andreas Gursky - Visuelle Räume der Gegenwart (2023)

Change of Work (MAST Photo Grant, 2023)

Das Schillern der Nacht (Paco Carrascosa: Jack Daniels and Mr. Freud) (2022)

The Shimmer of Night (Paco Carrascosa: Jack Daniels and Mr. Freud) (2022)

Heatwave (Dongkjun Vak - A New Gaze 3) (2022)

Heatwave (Dongkjun Vak - A New Gaze 3) (2022)

F&A -  Einige Fantasien, einige Ver(w)irrungen (Fotografie und Architektur) (2022)

F&A - A Few Fantasies, A Few Aberrations (Photography and Architecture) (2022)

View - Review - Overview (Screen versus Print) (2021)

Ansicht - Durchsicht - Übersicht (Screen versus Print) (2021)

Richard Mosse: Drawn to Image Spectacle, Drawn to Forensic (2021)

Richard Mosse: Vom Bildereignis zur forensischen Analyse (2021)

JH Engström: Alles ist Leben. Vieles wird Fotografie (2021)

JH Engström : Tout est vie. Beaucoup devient de la photographie (2021)

New ReadView – Review – Overview (Print versus Screen)
(German version: https://ursstahel.ch/ansicht-durchsicht-ubersicht)

The screen has finally put an end to the discussions about prints. Or so it seems. For ten years now, we've been looking at photographs - or what's left of them - on liquid crystal displays. There's nothing liquid about them, but the crystals are controlled by electronic voltages and thus can change direction. Today we look at images which are “retro illuminated” or “backlit”, that is, lit up from behind. This began with the billboards in the streets during the 1970s and was transferred to the museums by artists like Jeff Wall in the 1980s. Initially, the pictures were illuminated by fluorescent tubes; since 2009, it's mostly LEDs that give us the impression of permanently awakened, excited images, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, running non-stop, provided the electric bill is paid. At night, perhaps around 11 p.m., we briefly notice that the screen is not neutral, not “white” transparent, but switches back and forth between the bluish daytime and the reddish nighttime modes. 

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Parallel to the changing appearance of photography, the size ratios have also changed. They were mostly divided into halves, quarters, eighths, or sixteenths, that is, reduced so much that the picture is only about 4x5cm or 5x5cm or 6x5cm, just large enough to be super handy and fit into the palm of your hand or a pocket. In exchange for the reduced size of the image, the time has increased during which the picture is “with us”, “by our side”, in front of us or next to us - always ready at hand, a click away, but at most already superimposed and displaced by many subsequent images. To put it simply: In spite of the flood of puppies during the pandemic, the real favorite pet of people today is the picture.

And this small picture beams or screams at us like the bleached teeth of a grinning face in an advertisement: always in a good mood, always radiant, constantly illuminated, or at least as long as the battery level does not drop below 20 percent. But all the radiance can't make up for the small format, unless the image changes with the dimensions. The usual image is no longer just small, but seems strangely lost, intangible, in the endless treadmill of trillions of other images that all beg for attention in the same way. The new world in miniature must be very clear, so that we can recognize it, so that we can immediately read it and ideally even understand it. There is hardly any space and time left for a classical experience of grasping or understanding images; accordingly, they begin to narrow down, to simplify, to become a symbol, a plea, a traffic sign: stop-and-go, left, right, above, below, yes, exactly, and not otherwise. The shiny little snapshot asserts itself in an electronic treadmill of contemporary images, bellowing out clear instructions and a booming visual statement to finally receive a little heart around his neck as a modest demonstration of sympathy.

That's the current state of affairs, after twelve to fourteen years of smartphones. How this photography, and our interaction with it, will find its way back into the exhibition space, is one of the potential central questions; the other one is how it can arouse and win the attention of a generation growing up with touchscreens, flashing lights, and endless immediate confirmation rituals within this exhibition space. Here, it is evident that active and passive attention along with contemplation and action will clash, each begging for awareness. Provided they meet at all.

We all know the strong sensual difference in the experience of “fabric”, whether we look at photo digitized fabric patterns on the Internet, for example, or whether we have the same fabric patterns before our eyes, able to smell them, grasp them, and feel how they run through our fingers, how they snuggle, how they rustle, crinkle, or perhaps how they silently swallow sounds. Not only do the colors look different, everything about the experience of real to digital fabric is different, not only after we drape the fabric pattern around our neck, our body. The postal service, DHL, UPS, and FedEx draw their promising business model from this difference: the number of parcel delivery and pickup increases significantly every month.

Well, classical photography is usually not made of fabric, but it is nevertheless made of paper and emulsion, different papers and emulsions. Thin, plasticized glossy papers, cardboard-strong semi-matte materials, natural papers with an open, haptic structure in light off-white, onto which standard emulsions are no longer applied, but rather into which homemade inks and solutions have literally sunk. The now nearly two-hundred-year history of photography ranges from needle-sharp, i.e. pinpoint-radiant renditions to complete dissolution or blurring of the photographic image, creating a watercolor effect. Not only the eye, the camera, and the context, but also the chosen printing technique and paper determine and alter the image and its perceivable content to a considerable, if not “shattering” extent.

In the 19th century, this was still visible in almost every photograph. The photographic development process manifested itself in the result, in calotype, ambrotype, salt paper print, platinum-palladium print, cyanotype or ferrotype, or photogravure, the precursor of rotogravure printing. Each of these processes produced a completely different tempered image. An image that was referred to as black and white was actually in color. The printing processes of pictorialism - gum bichromate printing, for example - allowed for blurred contours, different saturations of the paper, and thus created the possibility of a diffuse, ominous effect in a medium that was otherwise almost always reduced to its sharp reproduction. Also known as Straight Photography or New Objectivity, 20th century modernist photography and its consequences subsequently favored sharp, pinpoint reproduction so massively and convincingly, that it took decades for the soft, diffuse, pictorial method to get a chance again. 

And today? In the 1990s, the omnipresent discussion among photographers consisted of complaining that digital recording and printing techniques were still far from being able to hold a candle to the standards of analog processes. Too little depth, too little saturation due to too few pixels were blamed on the new digital techniques for a decade. At the same time, we all overlooked - blindly, before and during digitization - that the printing of photography would recede into the background to a previously unimaginable extent, that the vast majority of photographic images would never be printed at all, but only stored as files and then circulated around the world as low-res by email or as high-res by WeTransfer and other platforms of the kind. And this, paradoxically, at a time when digital printing, i.e. inkjet, pigment, and carbon prints, offered for the first time the real possibility of easily transferring photography to a wide variety of materials with great results, or of allowing it to take effect, and thus of allowing the concept of the photographic image, of the image object, to experience a clear broadening, expansion, and perhaps even a consolidation.

To put it bluntly, we are currently experiencing a colorful image schizophrenia. We talked about the trend towards overly clear images at the beginning - as a counterbalance to the uniform backlighting of miniature images and in the hope that a degree of comprehensibility remains in the assumed certitude. If we look at the second trend, that pictures are hardly ever printed anymore, then we lose the active possibility of the image-work, image-item, that is, the image-object, in which image information, arrangements, and materializations go hand in hand, mutually strengthening, supporting, or sometimes even contradicting each other. We also lose the opportunity to create and perceive layers of open, imprecise, ambivalent, or ambiguous effects in these combinations. All gray and foggy zones fall away. What remains is the futile assertion that we can communicate exactly, precisely with images, combined with a breathless struggle for an overview, and the equally futile assumption that we can understand and explain the world with “1” and “0” and nothing in between.

Isn’t that a bit of a shame? That’s why I’m all the more pleased to see that many different printing techniques are gathered in this exhibition. If reflective glass doesn't detract from the effect, great prints sometimes look like shimmering velvet to us, and we are overcome by an urgent desire to touch them.