Look at my face: my name is Might Have Been; I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell, as Edgar Auber phrased his, according to Giorgio Agamben, pretentious dedication on the back of his photograph, given to Marcel Proust. Appropriated from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sonnet, The House of Life, this memorable dedication became the leitmotif of Proust’s life, a guideline that hunted the writer, a synonym of love, memory and remembrance, as well as an evidence of Proust’s authentic passion for photography. Following the promiscuous life of pictures, the exhibition BEYOND refers to Auber’s dedication and considers it as a unique definition of photography, which contains reflection upon time and its fragmentation, performance and its exigency, as well as distance and its gesture of separation.

BEYOND (Look at my face: my name is Might Have Been; I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell.) is foregrounding a self-reflexive nature of the photographic medium and its current condition, as well as the photography’s conditionality and exigency (which Agemben calls “a demand for redemption“, or what he perceives as an agent of the „real that is always in the process of being lost, in order to render it possible once again“). What makes photography possible; what makes it work, being useful and acting in a relational way; how photography continuously contributes to the architecture of the image and goes BEYOND (it); what makes photography speak; what is gestural about it; how to go BEYOND the medium or move AROUND while simultaneously remaining within the photographic discourse?

BEYOND, as an assemblage of photography-based work, first of all, focuses on artistic positions that are concerned with the use(s) of photography, as well as those that are interested in the broader notion of the medium in the expanded field, marked by blurred borderlines between other forms of expression and escaping categories, seducing senses, other provoking story-lines. Furthermore, the behaviour of a photographic image is being here analysed and the photography considered as a spatial practice is in focus.
 Conditions such as in-between, beyond, or parallel to and more than are essential for this show, which concentrates on subversive and critical approaches to image production, and the status of photography as a medium, exposed to manipulation and abuse. Artists’ usage of image is an illuminating on-going process of questioning image’s ontological stability. Oscillating between appropriation and an original, illusion of a movement and suspense, flatness and three-dimensionality, it generates a new – not yet defined – quality of perception that requests spontaneity, as well as a certain gesture of implied improvisation from viewer. In majority of cases, it is a highly performative proposition where the non-existing movement, in fact, is a movement of a performance.

BEYOND departs from one of the most beautiful essays ever written about photography, “Judgement Day” by Giorgio Agamben (included in his collection of essays, Profanations) where photography gains a mission of “capturing the Last Judgement”. It represents the world as it appears on the last day, the Day of Wrath when „everything that happens“ is called forth, summoned to appear on Judgement Day. Agamben analyses the relationship between gesture and photography. For him, the photograph is always more than an image: “It is the site of a gap, a sublime breach between the sensible and the intelligible, between copy and reality, between a memory and a hope.” While embracing the formal and the narrative and acting as an interruption, or a rupture, or a break, this exhibition’s ambition is to map such a breach.

BEYOND takes into consideration cross-photographic positions, such as Geoffrey Farmer’s image theatrics (installation/sculpture/photography), or Helena Almeida’s photographic self-portraiture (performance/drawing/painting/photography), or John Gerrard’s animated architecture of vision (video/photography/light box), or Elad Lassry’s uncanny subjects’ mise en scène (object/film/photography). Other artists of the exhibition, such as Becky Beasley, Haris Epaminonda, Stefan Burger, Alexandre Singh, Banu Cennetoglu, Marlo Pascual, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Iñaki Bonillas Anette Kelm, Sunah Choi, Miriam Böhm, Tatiana Lecomte and Caroline Heider contribute to the notion of a photography, perceived as a spatial, performative and self-reflexive, post-conceptual practice. The newly produced, side-specific installation by Dénes Farkas frames and animates the exhibition space, recalling a photographic process of reality’s duplication, while early films by John Baldessari (including Art Disaster, 1971, and Ed Henderson Suggests Sound Tracks for Photographs, 1974) negotiate the photography’s form and meaning.

Open from 7 October 2011 – 8 January 2012
Venue: Kumu Art Museum (Weizenbergi 34 / Valge 1)
Curator: Adam Budak
Artists: Helena Almeida, John Baldessari, Becky Beasely, Iñaki Bonillas, Stefan Burger, Miriam Böhm, Banu Cennetoglu, Sunah Choi, Haris Epaminonda, Dénes Farkas, Geoffrey Farmer, John Gerrard, Caroline Heider, Anette Kelm, Elad Lassry, Tatiana Lecomte, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Marlo Pascual, Alexandre Singh