106 | 2009

Once again, in this issue No. 106 Camera Austria features an array of aesthetic and conceptual positions that may, at first glance, appear very different, also in terms of content. The artist’s contributions and the accompanying essays in this issue look into questions of central importance in the current debate on the artistic and socio-political relevance of media that depict reality. The contributions in this issue set out to conceive art as socially necessary work, whose political significance, however, need not lie in the direct depiction of social facts but rather in uncovering layers of perception and description in which experience can be demonstrated and shared.
A critical, contradictory relationship to the sphere of the visual is characteristic of the conceptual photography of Czech artist Markéta Othová; her sensitive work, rich in variation – almost exclusively black-and-white photographs – revolves around questions of perception and the reliability of what we perceive. For as Karel Císarˇ expounds in his essay on the artist, “However, for a photograph, being indexical does not mean being faithful”. He cites her untitled diptych from 2008 as an example: “Othová has captured one and the same bunch of flowers, first against a dark and then against a light background, with the object thus being captured as light-coloured in the first photograph and dark-coloured in the second. Combined in a single installation, we will tend to consider these two independent images merely as a positive and a negative”.
The most impressive form of presentation of the critical documentary work of Nigerian photographer George Osodi is a projection consisting of two hundred slides, that he put together from pictures taken between 2003 and 2007. In this issue we are featuring a selection from this photographic essay: His subject is the Niger Delta, one of the richest oil producing regions in the world. The wealth obtained by Nigeria here contrasts with the social, ecological and economical impoverishment of this region. In his work, George Osodi describes the impacts of decades-long exploitation on the “real people”, as he says. “In recent times, the impact of oil in the lives of most oil producing regions has been highly paradoxical […] I want to put a human face on this paradise lost”. The powerful effect of his individual pictures sets his work in the context of critical journalism; Nigerian artist and philosopher Frank Ugiomoh sets out in an aesthetic and image-rhetorical approach to examine the photographer’s subjective gesture against the foil of the political and historical context in which this work was done.
The third position we are presenting is the film and installation works of Polish-born, Vienna-based media artist Dariusz Kowalski, that focus on surveillance and observation images taken from the flow of data on the Internet. He does not, however, “translate their visual grammar, with classical stereotypes of the control dispositif, one-to-one into a politically coded discourse of surveillance, but rather raises fundamental questions about the experience of space and the placement of the subject within a panoptically organised geography”, as Roland Schöny explains in his essay on this work.
Along with the protagonists of these main features, we would like to thank all the artists, authors and translators who contributed to this issue: We are gratified that this issue ofCamera Austria once again reflects the firm international network without which a project such as Camera Austria would not be feasible. Many thanks to our readers, subscribers and advertisers for your continued interest, and we would be pleased to meet you soon at the art shows in Basel!

Christine Frisinghelli
May 2009