Divination from a Night Sky Partially Obscured by Clouds
The Role of Photography in the Post-Media Age
GHMP Prague City Gallery
House of Photography
Revoluční 1006/5
110 00 Prague 1 – Staré Město
Date: 24 May – 11 September 2022
Although artistic photography, like any other photography, has long since ceased to be a specific, easily definable medium, it perhaps still remains a sensitive record depicting the identities of the contemporary world. However, the question of what its role is — since being adopted by the Internet and social networks — preoccupies not only contemporary theorists, but above all many artists themselves.
Exhibiting Artists: Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, Hynek Alt, Ruth Beale, Stano Filko, Ivars Gravlejs, Jana Ilková, Nikol Czuczorova, Richard Janeček, Andrej Kiripolský, Zuzana Markéta Macková, Markéta Magidová, László Moholy-Nagy, Markéta Othová, Matěj Smetana, Lucie Rosenfeldová, Erica Scourti, Matěj Smetana, Jonáš Strouhal, Petr Svárovský, Ezra Šimek, Jiří Thýn, Leevi Toija, Aleksandra Vajd, Max Vajt
Curator: Jitka Hlaváčková
Co-authors: Paľo Fabuš, Lucía Stach Gregorová, Jitka Hlaváčková, Hana Janečková, Václav Janoščík, František Kalivoda, Jen Kratochvil, Andrea Průchová Hrůzová, Vojtěch Märc, Barbora Trnková, Pavel Vančát, Filip Vančo
The multiplicity, manipulability, and ubiquity of the digital image provide almost limitless possibilities, and the oscillation between representation and participation, the authentic and the posthuman, the moving and the static, and other interfaces, raises a range of topics and retrospective reflections on the medium. In response to the elemental process of fragmentation of a peculiar artistic medium into a shared, autonomously-acting communication network, we can observe various reflexive approaches in the work of artists based on photographic principles: the turn to materiality and organic forms, to tactile and other sensory aspects, to the singularity of the work, to abstract forms, to accentuating the social and psychological functions of the medium… The range of all approaches is hard to grasp except metaphorically – for example, by imagining an expanding universe. We have posted the keyword “post-media photography”. Some remarkable objects, ideas, and insights turned up which we present as we found them: through responses from a dozen theorists, we offer a fragmentary probe into postmedia photographic and digital imagery that at least symbolically captures the hybrid and highly networked nature of our situation. We catch a glimpse of cosmic objects created in the recent past or decades ago, observable from ever-new angles.
A Lament for Power, Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, 2020
Commissioned by Art Exchange, Colchester