122 | 2013

MICHELE ROBECCHI

Shirana Shahbazi: The Deceiving Truth

Shirana Shahbazi’s work (…) possesses technical and philosophically distinctive traits, and although very visible, they are a little more difficult to pinpoint. Shahbazi has repeatedly displayed strong social sensibility, but the notion that would see her as a plain political artist is challenged by her dialogue with classic art forms like studio portraits, abstract shapes, and still lifes. The profoundness of her insight and the conceptual approach that dominates her efforts are contrasted by the creation of images that provide the extra option of being appreciated, on top of their meaning, solely for their intrinsic beauty. Her installation method, which involves the simultaneous coexistence of a variety of subjects shot in different times and places, and reproduced in different sizes, generates all-embracing environments conspicuous for the presence of many centre points. Finally, her recurrent juxtaposition of wall paintings, hand-knotted carpets, and wallpapers disrupts media categorisation, pointing towards an awareness that the visual world can be evaluated to the full only through a multifaceted perspective on photography. Defined by the duality of looking familiar and unfamiliar at the same time and a rich visual vocabulary governed by a sharp brain, Shahbazi’s work acts a reminder that making art which everybody understands is not about being literal but about creating something that arouses a response.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 122/2013, pp. 9–20.

MARK DURDEN

Wolfgang Tillmans: The Freedoms of Photography

Tillmans’s photography is very much an affirmation of the sensuality of being in the world. Part of the pleasure before his work—and pleasure is key—is the way in which we encounter the joy in both the sensuous form of photography itself and in the beauty of the things in the world that photography can so vividly describe. He never shies away from beautiful things. Indeed, the overriding note of his photography is one of affirmation and celebration. For over a decade, Tillmans has also explored the abstract formal possibilities of photography. In presentations of his work we now shift between the often unexpected formal beauty and intensities of the photograph as an abstract picture and the sensuality of his rich, evocative, and distinctive portrayal of aspects and moments from the contemporary world.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 122/2013, pp. 21–32.

 

VANESSA JOAN MÜLLER

Stephanie Kiwitt: Promise of Use Value

On a visual level, Kiwitt—who studied in Leipzig and spent several years in Brussels—pursues a decidedly cool and ostensibly objective approximation of her subject. Her photos, generally presented in series, are distinguished by a diagnosing gaze that adapts the cold and calculating logic of our economic present to fathom its fissures. Her impressions of the places where society’s re-formatting according to neo-liberal principles has been absorbed into everyday life shroud the seductive surfaces with a matte gloss, from which everything—both critique and empathy—seems to pearl off. The brilliant surface finish of the advertising posters, the Photoshop-generated highlights on the faces and bodies, the pointedly implemented streaks of chrome on the sports equipment—all this is missing from Kiwitt’s gym shots. Paradoxically, it is precisely this lack of retrospectively added visual enhancement that makes man and machine seem technical in equal measure. This alienation also intensifies a firmly object-focused gaze, which views both equipment and gym-goers as clocked working units and fails to really differentiate between polycarbonate cladding and breathable clothing. And when the motion embodying the spirit and purpose of a health club is arrested—its very trace utterly removed from the picture—the bodies ossify in an artificial pose, while the unused equipment almost appears to take on human features.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 122/2013, pp. 33–43.

ÓSCAR FARIA

Heinz Peter Knes: Claro Intelecto

the beat of “New Dawn” by Claro Intelecto still echoed in my ears, covered by a hood. i did not remember the hours. i had stayed up late. blue kisses and Friedrich Hölderlin’s verses memorised years ago. the continuous beat while the past burned before my eyes. i returned there countless times. i sought an abandonment. an ethics. an odour of burnt bramble bushes and wood was now inhaled. the flames mixed with the dawn, with the years, the seasons. motionless, i recalled being in there, alone. a cigarette butt forgotten between the fingers. the greasy parka shinning on the forearm. it was rather cold, despite the fire that raged to a considerable height: the cabin stood, sublime, in a final combustion. the memory of those days: headphones at top volume and the city vanishing behind, moving towards the shelter. coffee, cigarettes, a few eggs to scramble: enough to go through the hours. we talked of revolution: the peasant uprising of 1846. and of Jakub Szela: the desire for another life stirred our hearts. we exchanged books and passions. we wished the conversation could last until the following day. we were friends, few, happy: we dreamed of changing the world.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 122/2013, pp. 45–56.

T.J. DEMOS

Spectro-Aesthetics 2/4 The World Without Us

Would ghosts haunt a world without us? Investigating the end of time when there will be no more thought to think it, Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (2007) offers no answer to that question but it does set up the terms of its consideration. The book attempts to comprehend the logical consequences of the Enlightenment’s disenchantment of the world through reason and refuses to defend against the threat of nihilism by safeguarding the experience of meaning. Yet rather than positioning nihilism as the heroic conquering of metaphysical thought, or as an act of empty negativity that represents a “calamitous diminishment” of the world’s significance deprived of human values, Brassier positions it as a “speculative opportunity”.¹
While primarily a philosophical text without ecological reference, it can be no coincidence that Nihil Unbound comes to us in the context of the sixth mass species extinction event, which we are living through right now. Owing to a combination of climate change, environmental destruction, and the spread of humans worldwide, we could see the die-off of roughly half the world’s plants, animals, and birds in the next seventy years. Such an eventuality poses questions such as what a world would be like without its vibrant biodiversity; and ultimately, if that biodiversity is life-sustaining for humans, what a world without us would be like.²

¹ Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. xi.

² See Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (London: Virgin, 2008).

Text feature in Camera Austria International 122/2013, pp. 71–72.