Museum voor Moderne Kunst ArnhemFebruary 15 - April 21, 2013
PHYSICAL & VIRTUAL BODIES
Gabriele Beveridge, Barbara Bloom, Bonnie Camplin, Fleur van Dodewaard, Cheryl Donegan, Andrea Fischer, Nan Hoover, Inez van Lamsweerde, Rachel Niffenegger, Lidwien van de Ven, Barbara Visser, Christoph Westermeier
Portraits and postures, acquainted through media, advertisement or (art) history, are marked with the stigmata of the accustomed, the familiar and the every-day. They not only strongly shape our ideas of the (human) body but also create and reinforce viewing patterns and clichés of the perception of the very same.
Since the arrival of modernism artists were intensely preoccupied with exploring the capacities of images, their engraved narratives and their representation of bodies and gender in contemporary culture. In the 1990s new modes of digital processing and unlimited reproduction opened new possibilities for image (re-)production. The imagery of media (MTV), blue screen techniques and ways of digital image manipulation infiltrated contemporary ways of processing images.
The exhibition Physical and Virtual Bodies includes a selection from the past two decades, departing from the museum’s collection and invited artists, who present recently produced work. By the use of the media of photography, film and installations these artists confront and subvert the contemporary images of the everyday world and liberate their representational aspects. By applying different strategies, the presented artists endow pictures with new capacities and question the production of meaning.
By any means the artists aim to recreate or capture the body. But by reinventing its form they cause changes, certain distortions in the translation of often-familiar images and motives. Via mechanisms of abstraction, re-creation, appropriation or absence they challenge our ideas of the body. These bodies (present or sensed by their absence) become independent from their accustomed context and create a charged space between picture and the imagination of the viewer.
Co-curated with Kris Dittel in the framework of the curator-in-residence program of Schloss Ringenberg (Hamminkeln).
Photography: Charlotte Lagro
