The Multiple eXposure Project is a multimedia, multi/trans/inter-disciplinary artistic practice and research-based initiative that explores the many layers of image-making, participatory photography, visual ethnography, and performative encounter(s) between the image and the spectator; the subject and the viewer. As what the name of the project implies, this endeavor is profoundly interested in the notions of the “multiple” and the “exposure” both in their literal and symbolic sense.
Firstly, The Multiple eXposure Project seeks to examine the multiple potentials of image-making or photography (digital and analogue; still and moving) as a medium, a performance, and an instrument of social engagement and (ex)change, and the overlapping of it with other disciplines. As part of its exploration, this project involves a series of visual, photographic or lens-based workshops in collaboration with non-profit, grassroots volunteer groups. The concept of the multiple is also applied under the framework of collaborative work – of bring together multiple individuals with multiple philosophies into a plurality of shared experiences.
Secondly, The Multiple eXposure Project is equally drawn to the idea of “exposure” (subjection, experience, vulnerability, coverage, documentation, and so on) in the process of socially-engaged image-making that exposes what needs to be exposed; clarifies the obscure; and concerns itself with a gamut of critical questions and discursive issues of representation.
Through image-making, we aim to expose and get exposed.
Public Interrogation: Outside the White Cube (December 1-31, 2015)
Public Interrogation:
Outside the White Cube
Organized by The Multiple eXposure Project
www.themultipleexposureproject.co.nr
Location: Public Spaces, Metro Manila, Philippines
Date: December 1-31, 2015
December 1-2 (8pm-10pm): EDSA Avenue cor. Kamuning Rd. Quezon City
December 5 (7pm-9pm): Ayala-Paseo Pedestrian Underpass, Makati City
December 13 (6pm-7pm): Alabang-Montillano Footbridge, Muntinlupa
Public Interrogation:
Outside the White Cube is an alternative, traveling, curatorial project that features image-based works across different disciplines and media by emerging artists whose works discuss the notion of the “public” and its complexities.
What is public? What counts as public? The “public” is a multi-layered concept defined differently depending on how the term is used and framed. It is a notion devoid of singularity and is, grammatically speaking, a terrain of contradictions. As a noun and an adjective, the public constitutes the people, masses or community, and suggests anything that is staged, accessed, or seen out in the “open.” The public can also be used as a verb to describe something one does, as in make public or publicize, suggesting the movement or shift from the inside (private) to the outside (public). Paradoxically, however, the same term also points to the limits of such openness and movement. Given that it simultaneously refers to something “involving and provided by the government”, the public is always at risk of becoming merely an apparatus of the sovereign state and its institutions, thus making the flow of its production, distribution, and consumption partial and counterproductive.
Public Interrogation:
Outside the White Cube seeks to re-frame the practice of curating and spectating images outside the exclusionary, institutional borders of the “white cube” or gallery space. Public spaces are used as an exhibition site to stimulate a mode of spectator experience that revolves around displacement of the passersby (public) from their “habitus” by interrupting the flow of pedestrian traffic. We alter a familiar public space and transform it into an unusual, dialogic site for image projection and exhibition, taking advantage of its accessibility and site-specificity in order to redefine the ways the spectators look at and engage with images. Adopting “guerilla urbanism” as a curatorial strategy, we make sense of the immediacy of the “public” and reflect upon its context, meanings, and intersections with representation, place, and discourse. In so doing, we intervene and reformat aspects of the urban landscapes and emphasize the “counter-spectacle” in art viewing and appreciation. This project also underlines the inherent ephemerality of an open-to-the-public display in relation to time and space. As a “traveling” exhibition which heavily depends on projection technology and public space as its “frame” or “canvas", this project celebrates the momentary nature of image-viewing, consumption, and mobility in the metropolis at a time of constant flux and transition.
Video Arts
Borders - Anne Murray (USA)
The Separation Loop - Leyla Rodriguez (Germany)
Gnomonicity - Amitesh Grover (India)
36&71 - Anthony Stephenson (USA)
Sully - Marbella Carlos (Canada)
You See Davis - Rembrandt Quiballo (Philippines, USA)
Untitled (Sleeping People in a Train) - Hannah Reber (Germany)
Into the labyrinth - Geordy Zodidat Alexis (France)
The Safest of Hands - Clint Sleeper (USA)
Hunt/Find - Dani Salvadori (UK)
Leaving My Skin - Ellen Wetmore (UK)
Presence of Absence - Matt Lee (India)
Untitled – Mohammad Namazi (UK, Iran)
Still Images / Photographs
Right Time Right Place - Robert Rutoed (Austria)
Peripheral Strangers - Julie Dawn Dennis (UK)
De Staat (The State) - Maarten Tromp (Netherlands)
Ruinophilia - Anna Garrett (UK)
Circling the Square - Arturo Soto (Mexico)
The Spectator, the Viewer, the Observer and the Perceiver –
Francine LeClercq (USA)
Magic Rooms - Carlos Collado (Spain)
Date of Consumption - Lita Poliakova
Street Photography - John Robert Luna (Philippines)
Walls - Elena Efeoglou (Greece)
Fitting Room – Megan Mace (South Africa)
Street art you can take home (for free) - Lorenzo Bordonaro (Portugal)
Victim – Solomon Eko (Nigeria)
Performance Videos / Public Interventions
Balloon Performance - Louise Winter (UK)
Somarts Mural Dance - Johanna Poethig (USA)
Unpatentable Multitouch Aerobics - Liat Berdugo (USA)
Disclaimer at Manchester Art Gallery - Laura Gower (UK)
Sustaintability – Dani Lamorte and Veronica Bleaus (USA)
Animations / Digital
Job Interview - Dénes Ruzsa and Fruzsina Spitzer (Hungary)
In Between - Sofia Makridou, Theodora Prassa (Greece)
Decadence of Nature - Olga Guse (Russia)
AsianGirl N40°42'54.488" W73°59'30.313" - Victoria Elle, Rocky Li, and Jennifer Mehigan (USA)
Get Featured in our Blog!
We are currently expanding the content of our blog and we would like to feature multidisciplinary/multimedia artists, photographers, image-makers, visual artists, performers, and so on, their portfolio, artistic practice, and research interests. The feature section serves as a virtual, archival gallery and a platform for free promotion. This call is open to all artists – individuals or groups; amateur or professional – anywhere in the world.
If you think your works are relevant to The Multiple eXposure Project, send your artist statement, sample of your portfolio, photos, videos, press releases, and other related materials to themultipleexposureproject@gmail.com.
Moving Still: The Multiple eXposure Project Zine 2.0
The sophomore issue of The Multiple eXposure Project zine has been uploaded! You can read the e-zine at ISSUU or download the PDF version HERE.
New media and video artists included in the publication are as follows:
Jessica Buie /
Liat Berdugo /
Laura Hyunjhee Kim /
Nicola Hands /
Tony Radin Jacobs /
(c) merry /
Talia Link /
Justin Zachary /
Adrian Errico /
Matteo Pasin /
Jean-Michel Rolland /
Manasak Khlongchainan /
Boris Contarin /
Hüseyin Çife /
Suman Kabiraj /
Patrick Moser /
Francesca Fini /
Aaron Oldenburg /
Benjamin Grosser/
You Qi /
Dénes Ruzsa /
Fruzsina Spitzer /
Fran et Jim /
Amelia Johannes /
Heidi C. Neubauer-Winterburn /
Jess, Lau Ching Ma /
Scott F. Hall /
Eleni Manolaraki /
Elise Frost
Harrison Banfield
Jack Rees /
Daehwan Cho /
Wu Siou Ming /
Masako Ono /
Bárbara Oettinger
I
n this sophomore issue of the Multiple eXposure Project zine,“Moving Still”, we feature a heterogeneous breed of new media and video artists whose experimental and provocative works emphasize the potency of “videos” or “moving images” in the exploration and expansion of self-representation in the discursive flow of transmission and mediation – from the screen to the spectator; and the perceptive to the conceptual.
Selected artists here make use of the “screen” as medium and performance space. By displaying, curating, and performing in front of the screen, self-image-formation is enacted while relying on playful encounter with unknown spectators in order to weave different webs of interpretation. In this regard, the screen operates as an intermediary in the artist’s performance that brings connections to identities, personal narratives, history, everyday politics, and imaginaries.
The symbiotic relationship between the screen and the subject cultivates the construction of an image or spectacle that is consumed – temporally and spatially - in a doubling of intermediation. They deflect and reflect a plethora of shifting, hybrid pretexts about ourselves within the digital ecology where the delineating lines between the public and the private; the human and the mechanical; and the material and the virtual boundaries become blurred.
Given their hyperreal structure, these video performances, visual interventions, and recorded choreographies trigger a mode of mediated encounter that heavily manipulates moments of reality – of space and time. Intimacy and presence are concomitantly altered as these pieces can be incessantly scrutinized by the gaze of many anonymous viewers floating in the digital currents, allowing us to re-locate the individual and re-think about the concept of selfhood more fluidly.
Self-as-Subject: The Multiple eXposure Project Zine 1.0
We are pleased to announce that the very first issue of the Multiple eXposure Project zine is now accessible online! You can read the e-zine at ISSUU or download the PDF version HERE. Feel free to share!
Below is the list of contributors (artists and writers) included in the publication:
J.D. Doria /
Dr. Sayfan Giulia Borghini /
Aldobranti /
Olga Sidilkovskaya /
Ana Rita Matias /
Anne Paternotte /
Rudi Rapf /
Leigh Anthony Dehaney /
Laura Knapp /
Jennifer van Exel /
Derya Edem /
Arushee Agrawal /
Utami Dewi Godjali /
Çağlar Uzun /
Mahmoud Khattab /
Noel Villa /
Dawn Woolley /
Teresa Ascencao /
Kalliope Amorphous /
Katrina Stamatopoulos /
Gaspard Noël /
Florian Tenk /
Petra Brnardic /
Sana Ghobbeh /
Alonso Tapia-Benitez /
Libby Kay Hicks /
Agent X /
Rina Dweck /
Yoko Haraoka /
Claire Manning /
Pietro Catarinella /
Anne Beck /
Gabriel Orlowski /
Ralph Klewitz /
Anthony Hall /
Alessandro Martorelli /
Robin Gerris /
Carol Radsprecher /
Veronica Hassell /
Daniela Olejnikov /
Jayson Carter /
Nathaniel St. Amour /
Jonathan Armistead /
Piotr Boćkowski
"Who are you?” “Who am I?” “Who do I think I am?” “What am I made of?” There is nothing simple about such inquiries as they pose a number of phenomenological and ontological issues.
To ask yourself or someone about self-definition is to deal with its vicissitudes and fluidities, oscillating between the ego and the alter ego; the naturalistic (Hume) and the metaphysical (Kant); and the reflexive perception of one’s body and the relational introspection with the “Other.” The self is, arguably and fundamentally, a complicated subject matter. It is an ever-evolving object, a corporeal being, an affective body, a precarious entity, a discursive phenomenon, and so forth.
Divided into three interrelated chapters, this zine features oeuvres by artists and writers from different localities around the world and, as what its theme implies, is an exploration of the “self” and its manifold permutations – its presence, identity, representation, liminality, and (dis)embodiment - in this day and age of digitality, hypermobility, and hyperreality.
In Chapter 1, The Self as I/Other, authors reflect on the dialectics between the ego and the alter ego and the multitude of ways the “self-as-subject” is defined by both internal and external contingencies, or philosophically speaking, by the binaries – “I” vs. “not-I.” Many of these selected pieces are visibly entangled with the act of self-mirroring, which is inherently reflective and performative: it involves the constitution of subjectivities based on visual imaginary reflected on the mirror that does not necessarily resemble the complex structures of the material body. What I highlight here is the notion of self-perception (internal) in relation to one’s experiences and the (external) world. As Anthony Giddens puts it, “A person's identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor - important though this is - in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. The individual's biography…cannot be wholly fictive. It must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing 'story' about the self.” (54).
In Chapter 2, The Fetishized Self, we see interconnected self-representations that examine the convergence of idiosyncratic fantasies with the phantasmagoria as an offshoot of the fetishized commodity. When I refer to the term, phantasmagoria, I emphasize the volatile strings of imaginations through which the public and the private dimension of identity becomes obscured, blurring the demarcating lines between reality and fantasy. This section functions as a provocation of the fetishization of self and the centrality of the individual as authority. Through role-playing, the self, as a fetish object imbued with power and discourse, becomes an agency displaying and interrogating the politics of gender, sexuality, identity, and bodily desire.
Finally, in Chapter 3, The Fragmented Self, the fragmentation of identity framed within the digital, virtual, or hyperreal context is explored. Featured works here represent the various modes the anonymity, simulation, multiplicity, and control in data superhighway allow the transformation of the self into fragmented, hybrid subjects. The concept of “self-fragmentation” also revolves around the nature of post-modernism: the absence of absolute truth and the presence of disembodied self.
Bibliography:
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity, 1991.
Suzanne Lafont (born 1949) is a major figure on the French art scene. Her work came to the fore in
the 1990s. She had a solo exhibition at the Jeu de Paume and exhibited at MoMA (New York) in
1992, and then at Documenta IX (1992) and X (1997). Hers is an extended practice of photography
which incorporates references to theatre, performance, cinema and literature.
The exhibition at Carré d’Art offers a perspective on her most recent works, most of them made
specially for the event, but drawing on the photographs she has taken since 1995. These provide the
raw material for each proposition, allowing her explore different regimes of images in a series of
situations.
By way of introduction, 468 of these data are organised in the form of a slide show (Index). The
exhibition then develops around the figure of the actor/performer. This protagonist first activates the
space around the viewer, then, with Situation Comedy, from General Idea's Pamphlet Manipulating
the Self, it takes over the field of the book, before giving way to it entirely (The First Two Hundred
Fifty Five Pages of Project on the City 2, Guide to Shopping). Finally, it reappears in the adaptation of
Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Mystery of Marie Roget.
The exhibition ends with an announcement concerning coming talks (On annonce une série de
conférences) which, given the absence of informative content, restores the literality of the museum.
Publication
French / English bilingual catalog.
With a text by Marcella Lista and a conversation between the artist & Jean-Marc Prevost.
The book is designed as both a catalog reflecting the exhibition and a book directed by Suzanne
Lafont. The text of Marcella Lista analyzes the work of Suzanne Lafont by placing it in a history
of photography but also in performance. The interview with Jean-Marc Prevost tracks the
development of the artist's work while addressing the challenges present in the most recent
works.
SUZANNE LAFONT
192 pages
ca. 140 documents
Format 22 x 29 cm
Unbound book
Conversation Between Jean-Marc Prevost and Suzanne Lafont Given your training in literature and philosophy, I was wondering what it was that made you take an
interest in photography in the 1980s?
I don’t think I was every really a philosopher. However, when studying at university I did become
interested in a certain form of philosophy that connected ideas and situations.
Let’s just say that through a particular form of Socratic dialogue I discovered a way of contextualising
ideas in verbal exchange and the movement of walking. I also read Mikhail Bakhtin. From this I discovered
those literary genres that combine gravity and comedy, the rational and the irrational, philosophical
debate and adventure stories. At the same time I was reading Don Quixote, Jacques le Fataliste, and
Bouvard et Pécuchet. The question of reorienting my work only arose when I experienced the difficulty of
writing. Actually, this wasn’t like starting from scratch, more a gradual shift driven mainly by cinema and
dance. Cinema, of course, represented time and the mechanical image. Dance represented the real
unfolding of time in space. I went regularly to the American Center, where I saw Trisha Brown, Steve
Paxton and Lucinda Childs in the late 1970s. I was interested in ordinary movements, and of course in
walking as part of the movement of dance. My choice of photography wasn’t guided by a particular taste
for the medium, or by knowledge of its history. I became interested in photography because of this
concern I had to make cinema without the resources of cinema. This meant that proposition would be
constituted not by one image, but by a set of images, which required movement from the beholder in
order to be activated. My interest in photography began with questions about time, which could only be
driven by the viewer. Obviously, too, there was an economic factor in this choice. Unlike cinema,
photography had no production apparatus. It offered a guarantee of autonomy.
You spoke in an interview about the use of quotations in Flaubert’s late works. In art, quotation was
used systematically by Pop Art. But, coming back to Flaubert, and therefore to language, it strikes me
that the use of quotation is a strategy to indicate the autonomy of language, bearing in mind that
there is no natural connection between signifier and signified.
This absence of fit between signifier and signified inevitably affords freedom with regard to literary
form, which is what we find in Laurence Sterne and James Joyce. Photography, in contrast,
automatically introduces the idea of indexation, being indexed to the real.
It was also literary quotation, particularly in Flaubert, that led me to photography. In the same way as
linguistic quotation corresponds to a regime of readymade language, so it occurs to me that photography
is on the side of the “death of the author,” to use Barthes’s words, because apart from the framing, which
is a choice, the camera proceeds by the undiscriminating recording of what it has in front of it. We might
ask if recording is what guarantees the world, and if by an effect of osmosis, what is withdrawn from the
subject is necessarily chalked up to objectivity. I don’t think that the decrease in the “author” coefficient
necessarily coincides with a rise in the “world” coefficient. It is more by meaning, the direction attributed
to it with language, that a photograph attaches to a referent. Benjamin called the captions under images
“signposts.” Without these pointers the image would lack a context. A caption is a way of making a world.
There are several possible worlds in an image, and several narratives can be linked with it: that of
literality, that of dream, that of poetic utterances or that of descriptions. Which is why some of the
images in Index are described in several different ways. Photography draws on reality and the index, and
any photograph, even the emptiest, is like a shop bursting with things. But not until it is captioned and
made part of the weave of meaning does contact with the world seem to be established. That is why
uncaptioned photos seem surrounded with such a dense silence. In the exhibition we find the presence of language as much in Index as in the use of the space of the
book or the apparatus announcing a cycle of talks.
These are three different regimes of language. Index is a non-exhaustive set of data linking each image
with one or several linguistic inputs. Accompanied by their captions, the images are oriented towards
different contexts. The linguistic inputs also make it possible to establish a classification of the images
that does not take into account the chronology, themes or any other kind of classification. It is indeed the
job of a dictionary to make items available by disconnecting them from any kind of correlation. The
exhibition therefore begins with a kind of backroom, a space darkened for the needs of projection, where
the useful data is assembled. For about ten years, starting in the late 1980s, I photographed the human
figure. These images were staged and the figures represented in the course of what were generally
ordinary activities. Actions such as looking in such and such a direction, breathing, grimacing, lifting an
object, moving it, dancing, dreaming, etc., enabled me to take into account the space occupied by the
beholder. The images of grimacing faces directed towards the public, in particular, helped me understand
that the two territories, the two-dimensional wall and the three-dimensional room, could intersect and
resonate together, and therefore that the action was connected with the present of the exhibition. It was
only when I started making large-scale photomontages combining photographs of actions and
photographs of elements of the setting that I became aware that the representation was withdrawing
into the space of the wall. The more complicated the action, adding other planes to planes, the less it
entered the spectator’s volumetric space. I think that this is where my interest in books started. Situation
Comedy appropriates a book, which it replicates on the wall in the form of plates. It was surely an ironic
joke to have chosen to repeat a book whose theme is, precisely, a gymnastic movement! As for language,
in the form of page numbers and the distribution of roles, it remains on the paper. At the exhibition exit
there is an announcement concerning a series of talks. But the information is very vague, with none of
the detail you would expect about places, dates, times, the names of the talkers, the talks and their
subject. In just a few seconds it places those who might be interested in hearing them in a state of
expectancy, while a digital clock counts the real time in portions of 30 minutes, the purported duration of
each talk. A few photographs of chairs are hung in the museum room by way of decoration and evoke the
furniture conventionally used on such occasions. The statement acts as a perpetual declaration of a
session opening. It dramatizes the presentness of the situation and gives beholders their space back, but
while confiscating the spectacle from them.
In the 1980s photography gained its hard-won autonomy in the art system. Photography began to be
interpreted in relation to painting and, more particularly, the idea of the tableau. Jean-Marc
Bustamante called some of his works tableaux photographiques. What do you think are the limits of
this kind if interpretation, now that, today, we find it natural to read photography in relation to
video, cinema, performance and theatre? It was also a moment when photography no longer had to
justify its status.
In the 1980s it was maybe in Europe particularly that photographs were understood in relation to the
tableau. In the United States people like Ed Ruscha, Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre started using photographs
in book form, which is a long way from the tableau, back in the 1960s. My starting point was not the
tableau, nor was it conceptual art, which I knew very little about at the time. I had studied the dialogue
form and I had worked on these questions with Jean-François Lyotard, so I was bound to be familiar with
forms that are traversed by contradiction, with different regimes of language. The fact that speech does
not convey a finished and closed image of reality had, in a sense, initiated me into collage. I was also
reading Brecht. I dived head first into the interruption of illusion. This is the context that later led me to
develop forms that draw on theatre and cinema. Jean-François Chevrier, whom I started working with in
the mid-1980s, gave me a vision of photography and its history. In the debate around the image/tableau,
I was logically more attracted by editing procedures. I started taking photographs, aiming to give them a
kind of “insufficiency” that would allow them to enter into relation with each other. I was working with
the idea that, for example, a mountain would not be photographed among the set of elements that
constitute a landscape, but as a unit. This doesn’t mean that it would necessarily have the fragmentary
appearance a detail, but more that of a “spare part.” As spare parts, these images looked to me available
and repositionable, in exactly the same way as the words in a sentence are in the context of other
sentence. Which, of course, does not prevent words and images from existing on their own, as elementary
parts.
Looking at the different series of photographs you can see references to cinema, sometimes explicitly,
as in L'Argent, a homage to Robert Bresson. What is your relation to cinema and moving images in
general?
Interrupting movement in images, and by the multiplication of images, reintroducing time into the
viewer’s movement. What interests me is the displacement of time questions into space and the
integration of the context in the experience of perception.
One can also find links with theatre but I really don’t think we’re talking about the kind of
theatricalisation you find in Jeff Wall, which is inside the image. If there is a reference to theatre, it’s
above all in the definition of a sensorial space where images are assembled in a temporary way,
taking into account the context of their appearance. Am I right?
I was saying that dialogical forms led me to the representation of actions, not in the form of “tableaux”
assembling all the information, but by the arrangement of disparate bits. In editing it’s the brutal reality
of the cut, which arbitrates the transition from one image to another image, from one space to another
space, which liberates the play of associations and underscores the provisional character of the
representation. It’s also interruption that sets aside a territory for the viewer, even if only as a mental
projection, for the interval that joins and disjoins the elements, however slim, is occupied by real space.
But it is really when the plates are organised in a grid, and the grid, in turn, is organised volumetrically
and stands proud of the wall, that the reader/spectator regains a physical space of confrontation, in the
movement of the hand leafing through and turning the pages. I think that editing helped me in my
approach to the book form. This exhibition comprises a book, its catalogue.
To consider the theatrical reference is also to find a performative dimension in your work. You work
with actors, even if they’re not professional actors. This can be seen, for example, in Trauerspiel, made
for Documenta in Kassel, and my impression is that this performative dimension is even more present
today.
I wouldn’t say that there is performance simply because an action is played out. In fact, spectators find
themselves before an action that is acted and photographed. There are actually two moments of the
dramatic action. One is the taking of the photo; the second, the exhibition. The first moment occurs in a
studio, away from the public. Only the actor is present, along with any bits of set that may be needed. The
apparatus is constituted by the camera and any lighting there might be. The action was decided in
agreement with the actor. It is rehearsed and acted in the field of the camera. The actions are not studied
to be photographed live, but to be the product of an optical experience. Benjamin mentions this when
speaking of cinema in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility.” The camera, he says
with regard to cinema, has so deeply penetrated reality that only the artifices of editing can give the
image a semblance of naturalism. People have often remarked on the excessive theatricality of the figures
I photograph. Paradoxically, what appears “theatrical” is what takes them away from theatre and effects
the actions on the territory of observation and within its limited framework. I am not trying to “capture
the reality” of acting as a studio photographer would. The image obtained is at once the representation of
the action and its documentation. I would be tempted to say that the image, at this stage, is a document
endowed with a potential for action. It is in this double form that it is conveyed to the public. This is the
second moment, when the “active” documents are organised in the exhibition (scale of images/positioning
in space) and seem to be play-acting as they fish for the beholder’s empathy. With the question of the
book, this aspect of the work took a backseat, although it is evoked thematically in Situation Comedy. In
contrast, On annonce un cycle de conférences is wholly oriented towards the viewer and performative
experience, but without the medium of documents/performers.
In the exhibition, Situation Comedy is a reference to Manipulating the Self by General Idea, who
developed a visual and performative language within a post-Warholian aesthetic. How did this work
come about?
I was interested in the idea of an appropriation. There were lots of reasons for this particular choice. First
of all, the name of the collective, General Idea. Also, a liking for the name of that publication,
Manipulating the Self. These names are indications. Because it was a gymnastic movement that existed
only in a book. And also because I really like the way that at the turn of the 1970s these artists opened
their life space to the public in the form of a boutique, presenting the market as a poetic document of
existence. So, I got hold of the book with the intention of replicating all the occurrences of this fascicule.
Still, I decided to make it undergo a certain number of modifications through repetition:
- only the named occurrences of the book are repeated.
- the images are no longer in black and white but in colour.
- the original underground community is replaced by a false community, a group of students who exist as
a community only insofar as they are brought together by the institution.
- the participative dimension has become prescriptive; the original photos taken in the places frequented
by the protagonists are replayed following a unvarying photographic protocol: unity of place (the school’s
photography studio), artificial lighting (the colour filter on the lamp varies from one location to another),
the photographer arbitrates and records the scene (I took on this role).
With this series of rather academic exercises, the project dramatized the devaluation of lived experience.
The chromatic palette of the lighting in each sign served only to endow them with a pseudo-spark of
singularity. However, at this moment of the work, the proposition left only separate occurrences, with
absolutely no sense of a community experience, not even the lifeless one of puppets. What this collection
of individuals brought together by a given action lacked was a surface for communication, precisely what
would make it possible to create situations and give them a community foundation. I therefore decided to
continue by photographing the space without an actor, showing the full range of its hues (in other words,
three cubic metres of coloured light), while the attribution of the roles was maintained in the form of
notations, in the style of a programme or film credits. The twenty-three actions can, when actually
performed and photographed, be set against various coloured rhythms, or find their chronologically
assigned place when the ensemble takes the orderly form of a colour chart. Starting with a historical
proposition, I tried to make a poetic document that substitutes the reduction of individual experience
with the existence of a game.
In his book Art and Objecthood Michael Fried points out that Robert Morris uses the term “situation”
to signify that every element in a given situation has its importance, this being the condition of
objectivity. Might the frame be in a sense more important than the subject, or at least just as
important?
Yes, the interplay between the elements is the condition of a situation. According to Winnicott, it is the
basis of the symbolic construction.
The Multiple eXposure Project is run by a small group of image-makers, visual artists, and researchers coming from different backgrounds, with a wide range of interests.
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The Multiple eXposure Project incorporates theory and practice in image-making and publishes zine and scholarly articles, essays, stories on photography and visual narratives.
Collaboration with individuals and groups coming from different disciplines and backgrounds is of utmost importance at The Multiple eXposure Project especially in the workshops, exhibitions, and other projects. We underscore the potency of shared, ethical, participatory artistic process and accordingly of collaborative authorship by incorporating dialogical, performative interaction into image-making, bridging the gaps between the subject and the medium.
We curate our works in physical and digital configuration, applying methodologies on photo curation (of still and moving images) that are wide-ranging, alternative, experimental, and non-paradigmatic. To be specific, we delve into the concepts of photo curation, not just as praxis of selection or organization of images, or an archival method, but as a social intervention.
One of the crucial components of The Multiple eXposure Project is its practical initiative framed within the context of volunteerism, participation, and engagement. We believe in the collective power and benefits of sharing one’s skills and expertise with those who need them. We provide free photographic workshops, in cooperation with non-profit organizations, which are aimed at empowering marginalized individuals through photography or image-making.
PUBLICATION
The sophomore issue of The Multiple eXposure Project zine has been uploaded! You can read the e-zine at ISSUU or download the PDF version HERE.
Description: In this sophomore issue of the Multiple eXposure Project zine,“Moving Still”, we feature a heterogeneous breed of new media and video artists whose experimental and provocative works emphasize the potency of “videos” or “moving images” in the exploration and expansion of self-representation in the discursive flow of transmission and mediation – from the screen to the spectator; and the perceptive to the conceptual.
New media and video artists included in the publication are as follows:
Jessica Buie /
Liat Berdugo /
Laura Hyunjhee Kim /
Nicola Hands /
Tony Radin Jacobs /
(c) merry /
Talia Link /
Justin Zachary /
Adrian Errico /
Matteo Pasin /
Jean-Michel Rolland /
Manasak Khlongchainan /
Boris Contarin /
Hüseyin Çife /
Suman Kabiraj /
Patrick Moser /
Francesca Fini /
Aaron Oldenburg /
Benjamin Grosser/
You Qi /
Dénes Ruzsa /
Fruzsina Spitzer /
Fran et Jim /
Amelia Johannes /
Heidi C. Neubauer-Winterburn /
Jess, Lau Ching Ma /
Scott F. Hall /
Eleni Manolaraki /
Elise Frost
Harrison Banfield
Jack Rees /
Daehwan Cho /
Wu Siou Ming /
Masako Ono /
Bárbara Oettinger
The first issue of the Multiple eXposure Project zine is now accessible online! You can read the e-zine at ISSUU or download the PDF version HERE. Feel free to share!
Description: Divided into three interrelated chapters, this zine features oeuvres by artists and writers from different localities around the world and, as what its theme implies, is an exploration of the “self” and its manifold permutations – its presence, identity, representation, liminality, and (dis)embodiment - in this day and age of digitality, hypermobility, and hyperreality.
Featured artists and writers in the zine are as follows:
J.D. Doria /
Dr. Sayfan Giulia Borghini /
Aldobranti /
Olga Sidilkovskaya /
Ana Rita Matias /
Anne Paternotte /
Rudi Rapf /
Leigh Anthony Dehaney /
Laura Knapp /
Jennifer van Exel /
Derya Edem /
Arushee Agrawal /
Utami Dewi Godjali /
Çağlar Uzun /
Mahmoud Khattab /
Noel Villa /
Dawn Woolley /
Teresa Ascencao /
Kalliope Amorphous /
Katrina Stamatopoulos /
Gaspard Noël /
Florian Tenk /
Petra Brnardic /
Sana Ghobbeh /
Alonso Tapia-Benitez /
Libby Kay Hicks /
Agent X /
Rina Dweck /
Yoko Haraoka /
Claire Manning /
Pietro Catarinella /
Anne Beck /
Gabriel Orlowski /
Ralph Klewitz /
Anthony Hall /
Alessandro Martorelli /
Robin Gerris /
Carol Radsprecher /
Veronica Hassell /
Daniela Olejnikov /
Jayson Carter /
Nathaniel St. Amour /
Jonathan Armistead /
Piotr Boćkowski
Workshops
Excerpts from digital and analogue photography workshops at Koseli School, a center for slum and street children in Kathmandu, Nepal (January 2015). These participatory workshops incorporated photography with "playing" and performance.
Visual Intervention
Speech Acts and the Politics of Repetition SeriesDescription: This series explores the repetitive nature and patterns of speech acts and ritualized rhetorics of some of the world’s powerful and controversial figures by incorporating twice-recorded video footages with open-source background music.
Through the process of repetition, new meanings of the moving images and spoken texts are simultaneously (re)created. Specific words are on purpose repeated to generate a multitude of views and reviews and to deconstruct the stability of language. As a mode of visual intervention, these absurdly distorted and edited images/videos are also meant to make a dialogue with, distract, entertain, annoy, and disturb the viewers on the other side of the screen, while highlighting the intersections and contradictions between reality and absurdity; speech and power of the speaker.
Feel free to re-play and re-share!
#1 >>> Obama: You Kinda Screwed Up My Ending But That's Okay.
Video, animated gif, and stills created by Sherwin Altarez Mapanoo
Background music courtesy of einzimmersound
DIGITAL ART
Urban DomesticationDescription: An attempt to represent the psychological state of the subject who was performing to exist (and persist) as a corporate animal in the harsh and precarious dog-eat-dog world of the urban jungle.
Note: Point or click on the image to view its original version.
Suzanne Lafont (born 1949) is a major figure on the French art scene. Her work came to the fore in
the 1990s. She had a solo exhibition at the Jeu de Paume and exhibited at MoMA (New York) in
1992, and then at Documenta IX (1992) and X (1997). Hers is an extended practice of photography
which incorporates references to theatre, performance, cinema and literature.
The exhibition at Carré d’Art offers a perspective on her most recent works, most of them made
specially for the event, but drawing on the photographs she has taken since 1995. These provide the
raw material for each proposition, allowing her explore different regimes of images in a series of
situations.
By way of introduction, 468 of these data are organised in the form of a slide show (Index). The
exhibition then develops around the figure of the actor/performer. This protagonist first activates the
space around the viewer, then, with Situation Comedy, from General Idea's Pamphlet Manipulating
the Self, it takes over the field of the book, before giving way to it entirely (The First Two Hundred
Fifty Five Pages of Project on the City 2, Guide to Shopping). Finally, it reappears in the adaptation of
Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Mystery of Marie Roget.
The exhibition ends with an announcement concerning coming talks (On annonce une série de
conférences) which, given the absence of informative content, restores the literality of the museum.
Publication
French / English bilingual catalog.
With a text by Marcella Lista and a conversation between the artist & Jean-Marc Prevost.
The book is designed as both a catalog reflecting the exhibition and a book directed by Suzanne
Lafont. The text of Marcella Lista analyzes the work of Suzanne Lafont by placing it in a history
of photography but also in performance. The interview with Jean-Marc Prevost tracks the
development of the artist's work while addressing the challenges present in the most recent
works.
SUZANNE LAFONT
192 pages
ca. 140 documents
Format 22 x 29 cm
Unbound book
Conversation Between Jean-Marc Prevost and Suzanne Lafont Given your training in literature and philosophy, I was wondering what it was that made you take an
interest in photography in the 1980s?
I don’t think I was every really a philosopher. However, when studying at university I did become
interested in a certain form of philosophy that connected ideas and situations.
Let’s just say that through a particular form of Socratic dialogue I discovered a way of contextualising
ideas in verbal exchange and the movement of walking. I also read Mikhail Bakhtin. From this I discovered
those literary genres that combine gravity and comedy, the rational and the irrational, philosophical
debate and adventure stories. At the same time I was reading Don Quixote, Jacques le Fataliste, and
Bouvard et Pécuchet. The question of reorienting my work only arose when I experienced the difficulty of
writing. Actually, this wasn’t like starting from scratch, more a gradual shift driven mainly by cinema and
dance. Cinema, of course, represented time and the mechanical image. Dance represented the real
unfolding of time in space. I went regularly to the American Center, where I saw Trisha Brown, Steve
Paxton and Lucinda Childs in the late 1970s. I was interested in ordinary movements, and of course in
walking as part of the movement of dance. My choice of photography wasn’t guided by a particular taste
for the medium, or by knowledge of its history. I became interested in photography because of this
concern I had to make cinema without the resources of cinema. This meant that proposition would be
constituted not by one image, but by a set of images, which required movement from the beholder in
order to be activated. My interest in photography began with questions about time, which could only be
driven by the viewer. Obviously, too, there was an economic factor in this choice. Unlike cinema,
photography had no production apparatus. It offered a guarantee of autonomy.
You spoke in an interview about the use of quotations in Flaubert’s late works. In art, quotation was
used systematically by Pop Art. But, coming back to Flaubert, and therefore to language, it strikes me
that the use of quotation is a strategy to indicate the autonomy of language, bearing in mind that
there is no natural connection between signifier and signified.
This absence of fit between signifier and signified inevitably affords freedom with regard to literary
form, which is what we find in Laurence Sterne and James Joyce. Photography, in contrast,
automatically introduces the idea of indexation, being indexed to the real.
It was also literary quotation, particularly in Flaubert, that led me to photography. In the same way as
linguistic quotation corresponds to a regime of readymade language, so it occurs to me that photography
is on the side of the “death of the author,” to use Barthes’s words, because apart from the framing, which
is a choice, the camera proceeds by the undiscriminating recording of what it has in front of it. We might
ask if recording is what guarantees the world, and if by an effect of osmosis, what is withdrawn from the
subject is necessarily chalked up to objectivity. I don’t think that the decrease in the “author” coefficient
necessarily coincides with a rise in the “world” coefficient. It is more by meaning, the direction attributed
to it with language, that a photograph attaches to a referent. Benjamin called the captions under images
“signposts.” Without these pointers the image would lack a context. A caption is a way of making a world.
There are several possible worlds in an image, and several narratives can be linked with it: that of
literality, that of dream, that of poetic utterances or that of descriptions. Which is why some of the
images in Index are described in several different ways. Photography draws on reality and the index, and
any photograph, even the emptiest, is like a shop bursting with things. But not until it is captioned and
made part of the weave of meaning does contact with the world seem to be established. That is why
uncaptioned photos seem surrounded with such a dense silence. In the exhibition we find the presence of language as much in Index as in the use of the space of the
book or the apparatus announcing a cycle of talks.
These are three different regimes of language. Index is a non-exhaustive set of data linking each image
with one or several linguistic inputs. Accompanied by their captions, the images are oriented towards
different contexts. The linguistic inputs also make it possible to establish a classification of the images
that does not take into account the chronology, themes or any other kind of classification. It is indeed the
job of a dictionary to make items available by disconnecting them from any kind of correlation. The
exhibition therefore begins with a kind of backroom, a space darkened for the needs of projection, where
the useful data is assembled. For about ten years, starting in the late 1980s, I photographed the human
figure. These images were staged and the figures represented in the course of what were generally
ordinary activities. Actions such as looking in such and such a direction, breathing, grimacing, lifting an
object, moving it, dancing, dreaming, etc., enabled me to take into account the space occupied by the
beholder. The images of grimacing faces directed towards the public, in particular, helped me understand
that the two territories, the two-dimensional wall and the three-dimensional room, could intersect and
resonate together, and therefore that the action was connected with the present of the exhibition. It was
only when I started making large-scale photomontages combining photographs of actions and
photographs of elements of the setting that I became aware that the representation was withdrawing
into the space of the wall. The more complicated the action, adding other planes to planes, the less it
entered the spectator’s volumetric space. I think that this is where my interest in books started. Situation
Comedy appropriates a book, which it replicates on the wall in the form of plates. It was surely an ironic
joke to have chosen to repeat a book whose theme is, precisely, a gymnastic movement! As for language,
in the form of page numbers and the distribution of roles, it remains on the paper. At the exhibition exit
there is an announcement concerning a series of talks. But the information is very vague, with none of
the detail you would expect about places, dates, times, the names of the talkers, the talks and their
subject. In just a few seconds it places those who might be interested in hearing them in a state of
expectancy, while a digital clock counts the real time in portions of 30 minutes, the purported duration of
each talk. A few photographs of chairs are hung in the museum room by way of decoration and evoke the
furniture conventionally used on such occasions. The statement acts as a perpetual declaration of a
session opening. It dramatizes the presentness of the situation and gives beholders their space back, but
while confiscating the spectacle from them.
In the 1980s photography gained its hard-won autonomy in the art system. Photography began to be
interpreted in relation to painting and, more particularly, the idea of the tableau. Jean-Marc
Bustamante called some of his works tableaux photographiques. What do you think are the limits of
this kind if interpretation, now that, today, we find it natural to read photography in relation to
video, cinema, performance and theatre? It was also a moment when photography no longer had to
justify its status.
In the 1980s it was maybe in Europe particularly that photographs were understood in relation to the
tableau. In the United States people like Ed Ruscha, Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre started using photographs
in book form, which is a long way from the tableau, back in the 1960s. My starting point was not the
tableau, nor was it conceptual art, which I knew very little about at the time. I had studied the dialogue
form and I had worked on these questions with Jean-François Lyotard, so I was bound to be familiar with
forms that are traversed by contradiction, with different regimes of language. The fact that speech does
not convey a finished and closed image of reality had, in a sense, initiated me into collage. I was also
reading Brecht. I dived head first into the interruption of illusion. This is the context that later led me to
develop forms that draw on theatre and cinema. Jean-François Chevrier, whom I started working with in
the mid-1980s, gave me a vision of photography and its history. In the debate around the image/tableau,
I was logically more attracted by editing procedures. I started taking photographs, aiming to give them a
kind of “insufficiency” that would allow them to enter into relation with each other. I was working with
the idea that, for example, a mountain would not be photographed among the set of elements that
constitute a landscape, but as a unit. This doesn’t mean that it would necessarily have the fragmentary
appearance a detail, but more that of a “spare part.” As spare parts, these images looked to me available
and repositionable, in exactly the same way as the words in a sentence are in the context of other
sentence. Which, of course, does not prevent words and images from existing on their own, as elementary
parts.
Looking at the different series of photographs you can see references to cinema, sometimes explicitly,
as in L'Argent, a homage to Robert Bresson. What is your relation to cinema and moving images in
general?
Interrupting movement in images, and by the multiplication of images, reintroducing time into the
viewer’s movement. What interests me is the displacement of time questions into space and the
integration of the context in the experience of perception.
One can also find links with theatre but I really don’t think we’re talking about the kind of
theatricalisation you find in Jeff Wall, which is inside the image. If there is a reference to theatre, it’s
above all in the definition of a sensorial space where images are assembled in a temporary way,
taking into account the context of their appearance. Am I right?
I was saying that dialogical forms led me to the representation of actions, not in the form of “tableaux”
assembling all the information, but by the arrangement of disparate bits. In editing it’s the brutal reality
of the cut, which arbitrates the transition from one image to another image, from one space to another
space, which liberates the play of associations and underscores the provisional character of the
representation. It’s also interruption that sets aside a territory for the viewer, even if only as a mental
projection, for the interval that joins and disjoins the elements, however slim, is occupied by real space.
But it is really when the plates are organised in a grid, and the grid, in turn, is organised volumetrically
and stands proud of the wall, that the reader/spectator regains a physical space of confrontation, in the
movement of the hand leafing through and turning the pages. I think that editing helped me in my
approach to the book form. This exhibition comprises a book, its catalogue.
To consider the theatrical reference is also to find a performative dimension in your work. You work
with actors, even if they’re not professional actors. This can be seen, for example, in Trauerspiel, made
for Documenta in Kassel, and my impression is that this performative dimension is even more present
today.
I wouldn’t say that there is performance simply because an action is played out. In fact, spectators find
themselves before an action that is acted and photographed. There are actually two moments of the
dramatic action. One is the taking of the photo; the second, the exhibition. The first moment occurs in a
studio, away from the public. Only the actor is present, along with any bits of set that may be needed. The
apparatus is constituted by the camera and any lighting there might be. The action was decided in
agreement with the actor. It is rehearsed and acted in the field of the camera. The actions are not studied
to be photographed live, but to be the product of an optical experience. Benjamin mentions this when
speaking of cinema in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility.” The camera, he says
with regard to cinema, has so deeply penetrated reality that only the artifices of editing can give the
image a semblance of naturalism. People have often remarked on the excessive theatricality of the figures
I photograph. Paradoxically, what appears “theatrical” is what takes them away from theatre and effects
the actions on the territory of observation and within its limited framework. I am not trying to “capture
the reality” of acting as a studio photographer would. The image obtained is at once the representation of
the action and its documentation. I would be tempted to say that the image, at this stage, is a document
endowed with a potential for action. It is in this double form that it is conveyed to the public. This is the
second moment, when the “active” documents are organised in the exhibition (scale of images/positioning
in space) and seem to be play-acting as they fish for the beholder’s empathy. With the question of the
book, this aspect of the work took a backseat, although it is evoked thematically in Situation Comedy. In
contrast, On annonce un cycle de conférences is wholly oriented towards the viewer and performative
experience, but without the medium of documents/performers.
In the exhibition, Situation Comedy is a reference to Manipulating the Self by General Idea, who
developed a visual and performative language within a post-Warholian aesthetic. How did this work
come about?
I was interested in the idea of an appropriation. There were lots of reasons for this particular choice. First
of all, the name of the collective, General Idea. Also, a liking for the name of that publication,
Manipulating the Self. These names are indications. Because it was a gymnastic movement that existed
only in a book. And also because I really like the way that at the turn of the 1970s these artists opened
their life space to the public in the form of a boutique, presenting the market as a poetic document of
existence. So, I got hold of the book with the intention of replicating all the occurrences of this fascicule.
Still, I decided to make it undergo a certain number of modifications through repetition:
- only the named occurrences of the book are repeated.
- the images are no longer in black and white but in colour.
- the original underground community is replaced by a false community, a group of students who exist as
a community only insofar as they are brought together by the institution.
- the participative dimension has become prescriptive; the original photos taken in the places frequented
by the protagonists are replayed following a unvarying photographic protocol: unity of place (the school’s
photography studio), artificial lighting (the colour filter on the lamp varies from one location to another),
the photographer arbitrates and records the scene (I took on this role).
With this series of rather academic exercises, the project dramatized the devaluation of lived experience.
The chromatic palette of the lighting in each sign served only to endow them with a pseudo-spark of
singularity. However, at this moment of the work, the proposition left only separate occurrences, with
absolutely no sense of a community experience, not even the lifeless one of puppets. What this collection
of individuals brought together by a given action lacked was a surface for communication, precisely what
would make it possible to create situations and give them a community foundation. I therefore decided to
continue by photographing the space without an actor, showing the full range of its hues (in other words,
three cubic metres of coloured light), while the attribution of the roles was maintained in the form of
notations, in the style of a programme or film credits. The twenty-three actions can, when actually
performed and photographed, be set against various coloured rhythms, or find their chronologically
assigned place when the ensemble takes the orderly form of a colour chart. Starting with a historical
proposition, I tried to make a poetic document that substitutes the reduction of individual experience
with the existence of a game.
In his book Art and Objecthood Michael Fried points out that Robert Morris uses the term “situation”
to signify that every element in a given situation has its importance, this being the condition of
objectivity. Might the frame be in a sense more important than the subject, or at least just as
important?
Yes, the interplay between the elements is the condition of a situation. According to Winnicott, it is the
basis of the symbolic construction.
Rhizome - Rhizome is dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.
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