05 Jul 2010

'The Show with no Name' at Galerie Jette Rudolph, Berlin

'The Show with No Name' brings together four artistic positions that explore photography as relic or random excerpt from the world. The works use modern media and integrate photography into their concepts. In the style of the eponymous TV series from Austin, Texas, that combines ephemeral elements from television, cinema, music and documentation, the exhibition's focus is on consistently combining various media to create an image discourse based on conceptual photography. It is fundamentally inspired by self-reflection and research on the way exteriors and others are perceived.

Since photography first emerged as an art object and met with wider appeal during the Conceptual Art movement of the '60s, what happened in subsequent years is that the medium was no longer at the forefront of art production, but continually resurfaced. Yet what is remarkable today is that an extended form of photography is used as an immanent component in young artists' productions. An extended form because new technical possibilities and a fundamentally changed understanding of the image lead to an extension of photographic discourse, making it an image discourse that must, of course, involve transmedial approaches. With photography's omnipresence as an everyday medium and unlimited access to photo archives, these artists can no longer be understood as photographers who practice art, but as conceptual children for whom the photographic image clearly serves as a means to an end.

Amelia Bywater (NZ), Lars Morell (NO), Emilie Pitoiset (FR) and Tobias Spichtig (CH) use different strategies in their work, which incorporate – even require – photography. The questioning of apparent reality meets researching the photo between documentation and archive. If, on the one hand, photography serves as a medium to present an image, approaches involving mirroring or altered perception processes can be found in other works. While the works clearly explore the subject of conceptual photography, the focus is on the photography that is placed in the concept. This construction process culminates in the production of meaning for the (individual) artworks.