Photo exhibition: SITUATIONS #23 to #27 – Vanishing
Venue: Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, 8400, Switzerland
from 05-12-2015 to 31-01-2016, Tue – Sun: 11 – 18 hrs. Wed: 11 – 20 hrs. Mon: closed
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[A]s every citizen with a smartphone, laptop or tablet knows, photography is becoming increasingly ‘distributed’. Driven by the vast replicative power of digital algorithms, photographs now move with tremendous speed across a wide variety of devices and platforms. The distinction between the still and the moving image is becoming increasingly blurred. At the same time, digital vision is now profoundly social, implicated in many areas of human activity. Certainly, this is having an impact on practice as younger artists in particular work with a range of media and no longer easily describe themselves as photographers.
In our daily work we find ourselves speaking more of the photographic than photography, of photographic media, rather than the medium. This poses a challenge for a photography museum with a distinctive, but significantly analogue history. We are convinced that Fotomuseum Winterthur needs to react decisively and that this means far more than simply re-embracing a rather out-dated ‘digital turn’.
On 10 April 2015 Fotomuseum Winterthur launched a new exhibition format titled SITUATIONS, which allows us to react more quickly to developments within photographic culture. The role of SITUATIONS is to define Fotomuseum Winterthur’s vision of what photography is becoming, at the same time offering an innovative integration of physical exhibition space and virtual forum. Using tags and clusters as a mode of curatorial classification the aim is to integrate the real and the virtual in relation to exhibition in a new way.
Numbered consecutively, a SITUATION may last a few hours, or two months, and might be photographic imagery, a film, a text, an on-line interview, a screenshot, a photo-book presentation, a projection, a Skype lecture, a performance etc. It might take place in Winterthur or perhaps in São Paulo or Berlin and be streamed on our website. The idea is to construct a constantly growing archive of SITUATIONS, reframing the idea of exhibition in relation to new technologies and both our local and global audiences.
The SITUATIONS programme is organised around key clusters: the first was Relations (SITUATIONS #1 to #8), examining the changing social ontology of photography in relation to digital culture. The second cluster Seeing Machines (SITUATION #9 to #19) explored the way that technologies of seeing are increasingly devoid of human agency, the unprecedented power of algorithmic vision developing a new mode of ‘seeing’. Formats (SITUATION #20 to #23), the third cluster, dealt with lost and changing visual formats and the implications of these medial transformations for an examination of art and photography. Each cluster can be searched and reordered by visitors in the SITUATIONS online archive using a system of tags. Over time, new clusters and combinations – and new virtual exhibitions – will emerge.
The latest cluster, launched on 5 December 2015, is Vanishing (SITUATIONS #23 to #27). From the vanishing of a person or a social reality to the fading of an image – a memory, slowly disappearing and gradually shifting over time – to the digital image, in which traditional boundaries are dissolving, the fourth cluster explores the transitional moments inherent in the act of vanishing. How, and in what way, are each of these moments marked by the dynamics of (re-)configuration and (re-)appearance – of new forms and imaginary figures, of yet-to-be-explored territories that slumber in a state of in-between?
Submitted by Daniela Schwendimann
