The earliest photography based portrayals of photographers themselves date back to the early steps of photography and its shaping contexts. One of the finest early portrayals of the self, and definitely one of the most haunting and peculiar ones, is from Hippolyte Bayard who was one of the originators of photography. However, at the time he was not celebrated as much as some of his colleagues. Following this, as a reaction of not being accorded the same kind of respect as Louis Daguerre, in 1840 Bayard pictured himself as a suicide victim in a photograph named Self Portrait as a Drowned man. In his studio, he undressed himself, wrapped only a light drape around his lower body, positioned himself in his chair playing dead and made a portrait of himself.

Bayard’s now 175-year-old photographic gesture could be contemporary, so fresh it appears in its style and approach. As an act of portrait making, it has had a great influence on self-portraits to come. In this beautiful picture, Bayard visualized his personal anxiety, vested his skill and tools for performing his disappointment and documented it photographically. This ability to carry multi-layered motives is in the central role in self-portraiture today.

The gestures towards the self  focuses on photographic performances by Finnish photographic artists as Elina Brotherus, Antti Laitinen, Aino Kannisto, Heli Rekula, Iiu Susiraja, Marja Helander, Kari Soinio, Marko Karo, Erica Nyholm y Harri Pälviranta. In the artworks included in the exhibition, artists’ bodies are treated as objects, tools and means to make art. Artists position themselves in staged or re-enacted settings, contexts that are playful and sometimes even humiliating. With this manner, the artists ask rather fundamental questions about the ethical issues, objectivity and documentary possibilities of self-portraiture. Often the artworks are both absurd and political at the same time: they may directly refer to body-political issues or questions of femininity or masculinity but simultaneously they express humanity and playfulness and make references to history of art and photography. They also underline the importance of nature to Finnish artists, whether understood as human nature or natural surroundings.

It is noteworthy that Finland has a very long and prosperous tradition of photographers photographing themselves. This tradition reached its golden era with women entering the photographic arts in the 1980s. Ever since photographic gestures towards the self has had a notable role in photographic arts in Finland.

Harri Pälviranta
Curator

The investigation within knowledge, the constant observation, the love towards archaeology, towards anthropology, but above all the vital passion towards photography, from photography, are the essential features of the work of Teresa Correa.

In her habitat, in the world she reflects on the deepest black, the traces of the past acquire complete sense. Loads of piled bones, the funerary bundles, the image of a jaw or a hand, or the busts made with anthropologic enthusiasm, are elements which acquire a new consistency before her lens; a genuine quality of beauty that superposes empirical knowledge.

In the course of memory involves a path through her vital, as well as her artistic journey. The dialogue established from the depths of an excavation, from the attractive secret of the museum archives, with the elements that create the spatial vision of black light or, with the funerary bundles recreated in the work of Millares or, in an even riskier way, with her own image, support a continuous dialogue with photography. A dialogue where the consistency and the immateriality of the image, are established as the constant axis of her work.

If light -metaphor of knowledge- constitutes the essential substratum in her investigation process, we should not be surprised when photography is understood in its most original concept (darkness-light), a binomial that allows Correa to establish a reflexive process in terms of human condition and its role within Nature. A vital path for, since the most immediate landscapes surrounding her, as well as the space within museums -where this nature is classified, ordered and labelled- become the places where this artist strings together her entire artistic speech.

The storage within museums such as the Canarian Museum and the Tenerife Museum of Archaeology constitute the spaces of knowledge, where Correa allows herself to break the limit and reveal the “visibly hidden”. Making us dig into the collective memory, through the unveiling of Busts of Human Races, which inevitably settled the foundations of a refuted anthropologic speech, exemplifying thus a euro-centrist dominating past.

At a time like this one, where constant uncertainty prevails and all the historical memory is threatened by forgetfulness; where the dividing line becomes more obscene, systemic and unfair, Correa, as a last request, invites us to profane the image. An act of resistance, in so much as it reverts anthropological time with a boundary work, with the only intention of asking ourselves about the validity of a hegemonic obsolete speech which, tragically, settled the foundations of all racial discrimination.

A visual anthropology which, although universal, it does not stop being autobiographical.

Ángeles Alemán – Raquel Zenker

The exhibition depicts a sea journey from Spain to South America, almost following the Trail of Columbus’s 2^nd expedition to the New World. The display is comprised of 21 photographs taken over the course of a 21-day long ocean cruise, which show waves or rather their typology.

The subject doesn’t play the main part here. I focus on the theoretical and aesthetical assumptions, in a way autonomous in relation to the depicted reality. The works are continuation of a discourse between an individual and contemporary photography. Formally, aesthetics, being also the content, is the focal point of the collection and is an attempt to describe the modern aesthetics in a broader light. I further carry out my research on the blurred line between photography and painting. The theme is secondary albeit still quite relevant. I am not drawn to contextual critique of the reality, which then is translated into the visual language. My intention is not to create art but to find it, notice it, grasp it.

Experiencing the ocean and the distance responds to those requirements. Thematically, the presented reality has been heavily reduced, through which the reality can be shown fully, typologically but still in a general perspective. A deep and overtaking experience of sailing the ocean for the very first time on a greater scale is an essential part of the project. I don’t stop to work with the digital image – it’s not the primal cell phone model aesthetics, as it happened in case of the previous project. I turn to a professional cult 5D Mark II DSLR. The main motif here is structure, light and color.

You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. The exhibition speaks of the search of new ideas, resignation from the established forms as well as freedom and open-mindedness. The ocean is infinite, live, floating, constantly changing its surface, yet remains coherent in spite of its diversity.

I lived and worked in the region of the Balkans, Turkey and the Caucasus for more than a decade. My work focuses on the junction between chronicle and fiction, exploring ideas around concepts of borders, land, memory, desire,identity and history. I am interested in the telling of history, and in notions around periphery and edge. For me photography is a process of literacy, a journey of understanding.

Vanessa Winship

The photography of Vanessa Winship (born Barton-upon-Humber, 1960) establishes a dialogue with the mark left by the late twentieth century on people and the places they pass through: long processes defined by movements of fracture and integration, the instability of frontiers and the reaffirmation of identities. Her images, some of which are accompanied by short texts, offer a poetic gaze that is less immediate (but longer lasting) than that of photo-journalism, focusing on the effect of history on everyday life.

From the time she embarked on her project in the Balkans in the late 1990s up to her most recent work in Almería, Winship has focused on places in which human presence and the landscape seem to defy geo-political limits and historical events. All the potential and the documentary content of her photography thus shifts towards more intimate concepts such as vulnerability, the body and biography. Her series reveal the way in which physical features, clothing, customs, legacies, national and racial affiliations and governmental orders are inscribed on the skin. This is also the case with the way in which each unchanging landscape resists history or imprints on itself the wounds of a recent past through the ruined vestiges of political or social projects.

This dual nature, located between documentary research and personal investigation, is crucial to Winship’s work. Whether her images depict the immediacy of a moment that almost escapes the gaze or are based on a model posing, there is an element of authenticity, capable of generating a sentiment of what is common to all of us and shared through a gaze cast on the seemingly alien and distant.

Carlos Martín García
Curator

El ciclo Inter-video reúne un variado panorama de narrativas y experiencias formales y conceptuales del vídeo arte contemporáneo. Las obras seleccionadas están articuladas en cuatro programas que reflexionan en torno a las ideas de antropología, memoria y temporalidad; identidades colectivas/identidades individuales; apropiaciones y ficciones; tiempo/espacio.

Comisaria: Yolanda Peralta Sierra

Programa 1: ANTROPOLOGÍA, MEMORIA Y TEMPORALIDAD.
1 de diciembre de 2015, 19.00 h

Kyungwoo Chun (Corea del Sur, 1969)

18 x 1 Minute, San Sebastián, 2004.

Antonio Perumanes (España, 1963)

Mortaja, 1995.

Ana Teresa Ortega (España, 1952)

Visiones de ignomínia, 2005

Rui Calçada Bastos (Portugal, 1971)

Studio Contents, 2005.

Programa 2: IDENTIDADES COLECTIVAS / IDENTIDADES INDIVIDUALES
19 de enero de 2016, 19.00 h

Marina Nuñez (España, 1966)

Sin título (Monstruas), 2005

Willie Doherty (Reino Unido, 1959)

Non-specific Threat, 2004

Anthony Goicolea (Estados Unidos, 1971)

Classroom, 2002

Tiago Carneiro da Cunha (Brasil, 1973)

Low Attention Span – High Curiosity Rare, 2000.

Programa 3: APROPIACIONES Y FICCIONES
16 de febrero de 2016, 19.00 h

Martin Sastre (Uruguay, 1976)

Montevideo-The Dark Side of the pop, 2004.

Carles Congost (España, 1970)

That’s my impression!, 2001.

Andrew Gaston (Reino Unido, 1971)

Heaven & Hell, 2003

Rui Calçada Bastos (Portugal, 1971)

Quadrifoglio, 2001.

Programa 4: TIEMPO/ESPACIO
1 de marzo de 2016, 19.00 h

Sergio Belinchón (España, 1971)

Space I, 2004

Aitor Ortiz (España, 1971)

Sin título (El espacio recuperado: “Tabacalera”), 2005.

Rachel Reupke (Reino Unido, 1971)

Parc Naturel, 2003

Michael Najjar (Alemania, 1966)

The invisible city. Serie NNetropolis (2003-2005)