FARIDA YOUSSEF

What Is the Matter with Form? Images Becoming Collage

My mind now turns to stories of bodies changed into new forms.¹

The Collage as Gesture
When starting a new collage or figure, Ibrahim Ahmed goes through many images. Once a few stand out, he begins to cut and paste, shift and shape.² Varied gestures work to produce these collages. The recurring silhouettes are the result of a careful cutting-out, followed by the layering and then splicing of these fragments. It is a rich vocabulary that reflects a variety of movements choreographed to the theme of the body of work. As an example, in #22—from the sixty-­piece series quickly but carefully cross to the other side (2020–21)—the process of Ahmed working toward an understanding of his father’s past is mirrored in the many vertical cuts and splices. These collages make such sequencing of fragments their formal conception. With to gaze at a moving target #1 (2022), the sharpness of the cuts highlights the geometric nature of the fragmentation, which serves to subvert the gaze associated with photography. Ahmed’s gestures indicate an intuitive and embodied relationship with his work. More than the actions defining a practice, they are the synchronized movements of an artist with the body of work. The gestures of the artist are also the gestures of the collage.

The constructed male body is an important subject in Ahmed’s work, and he treats it differently in each series. Many of the images feature his father, his brothers, or even himself. However, owing to the nature of his collage practice, we see body parts, such as a torso, an arm, or a leg, spread in the same composition. This fragmentation engenders the complexity of the body as a subject of photography. Beyond this, however, the interplay of images and shapes brings the question of a new morphology through the collage. Ahmed makes his images by undoing the body and the face as we know them. Because it is never whole, the human body in his work could be considered absent. Indeed, a visual shape that runs throughout his series is the silhouette of the human body. These outlines are substantiated by material from other images, such as in quickly #59. The bodies of four men are carved out to create a silhouette filled with an archival image of a road with flags. Thematically, Ahmed pushes this even further in #15 from the series you can’t recognise what you don’t know (2020–21), where the image filling the silhouette belongs to an enigmatic photograph. By working out absence, it is the collage itself that feeds, shapes, and defines the human body.

1 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010), Book 1, lines 1–2.
2 From a conversation with Ibrahim Ahmed on April 2, 2023.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 162/2023, pp. 9–20.

CHRISTINA IRRGANG

Photography and Gesture

A large-format black-and-white analogue photograph shows a view of a sculpture from behind. The marble figure’s knees and upper body are bent; it’s carrying a massive sphere above its head adorned with zodiac constellations. A cloak reaching down to the floor is draped over the figure’s left shoulder. The sculpture is standing in a museum, in a room that’s provisionally cordoned off; it’s accompanied by another sphere on a pedestal with mythological constellations. The sculpture in question is the Farnese Atlas, carved in the 2nd century AD, the oldest surviving statue of Atlas. Anja Manfredi photographed it in 2019 at the Museo archeologico nazionale in Naples (from the Atlas series, 2019). For Manfredi, this Atlas is far more than a sculptural object or a photographic motif: it’s a figure of thought that she has been exploring in her photographic work ever since.
Accordingly, the title of her exhibition, curated by Lisa Ortner-Kreil in the Tresor of Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien (April 27 to June 25, 2023)—her first institutional solo exhibition in Vienna, the city in which she lives—is Atlas. The show gives Anja Manfredi an opportunity to develop Atlas as a figure of thought in the medium of analogue photography and in the context of its visual possibilities in a myriad of ways, bringing together fascinating discoveries of images that give rise to a loosely assembled narrative. In the process, Manfredi delves into various aspects that interest her and examines the connections between them. She explores the linguistic, etymological, mythological, (art) historical, geographical, geological, and evolutionary relationships revolving around the figure of Atlas, aspects that together give rise to a pictorial complex rich in association. At the start of the exhibition, we encounter freely hanging, large-format baryta prints of landscape photographs of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. These images, which Manfredi also photographed on her 2019 trip, sparked her exploration of the mythological figure of Atlas, after whom the mountain massif is named. And just as the Titan carries the heavens and symbolically the entire world on his shoulders, so too, it was thought, does the world rest on the crest of the mountain range into which Perseus transformed Atlas by confronting him with the head of Medusa and its petrifying eyes. Atlas’s beard and hair were transformed into forests, his bones became stone, and the stars in the sky came to rest upon him, according to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. When she photographs the decapitated snake-crowned head of a statue of the Gorgon Medusa in the park of Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace and juxtaposes it with the photograph of a snake (Gewand und Haut, 2021), Manfredi taps into these mythol­ogies.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 162/2023, pp. 21–32.

ANJA MANFREDI

LAUREN O'NEILL BUTLER

Breath by Breath

“Every sound we make is a bit of autobiography. It has a totally private interior yet its trajectory is public. A piece of inside projected to the outside. The censorship of such projections is a task of patriarchal culture that (as we have seen) divides humanity into two species: those who can censor themselves and those who cannot.”—Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound”

In Anne Carson’s landmark 1994 essay “The Gender of Sound,” the esteemed poet and Ancient Greek translator gathers women from classical literature—the Sirens, Helen, and Cassandra, to name a few. They stem from “a species,” as Carson writes, “given to disorderly and uncontrolled outflow of sound—to shrieking, wailing, sobbing, shrill lament, loud laughter, screams of pain or of pleasure and eruptions of raw emotion in general.”¹ Such were the qualities despised by Aristotle, Socrates, and most of the Ancient Greek playwrights, and poets, who all portrayed women groaning, babbling, fuming, and gushing—like mini volcanoes—seemingly all the time. As the Greek tragedian Euripides diagnosed, “For it is woman’s inborn pleasure always to have her current emotions coming up to her mouth and out through her tongue.”²

That pleasure, of course, was not to be tolerated. Carson’s essay is a searing indictment of the ongoing patriarchal distrust of women’s voices and the urge to silence them. Her points here continue to be fresh, and extremely relevant. To give just one recent example: when director Sarah Polley won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in March 2023, for her beautiful film Women Talking, she first thanked the Academy, with a laugh, “for not being mortally offended by the words ‘women’ and ‘talking’ put so close together like that.”

Sam Contis’s Duet (2016–ongoing) focuses on a woman’s precise control of her body to express sound. Her photographs and film of the vocalist Inbal Hever, who is based in New York and Berlin, draw the viewer’s attention to the singer’s body, but also to women’s bodies in general.

1 Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” in Glass, Irony, and God, with an introduction by Guy Davenport (New York: New Directions Books, 1995), pp. 119–42, esp. p. 126.
2 Ibid. Lines 94–95 of Euripides’s Andromache.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 162/2023, pp. 33–44.

LAURA GUY

What Is Moving About Photography?

Suddenly my attention was caught by a pair of hands, which seemed to arouse me insanely, for I realized that my own hands were trembling . . . —Valery Boothby¹

The narrator of a short story by the actress Valery Boothby is moved not by her nose, nor by a gut feeling, but by her hands. The simply titled text “Hände” (Hands) was published in the German magazine Das Leben (That Life) in 1929 and moves through a series of vignettes that take place during a journey on a passenger ship, the “Atlantic.” Told in first person, the narrator recollects an encounter with an exquisite pair of hands. In a state of agitation and desire, she searches for these hands, first across a dining table, then among the hands of many others. Reaching out across the page for the singular hands that she holds in her mind but never clasps, a gesture, extended between self and other, is suspended. Boothby’s text turns on the hand as an index of lesbian desire: a marker of friendship, agreement, and sexual expression. Grasping for the hand of another, Boothby looks for her object of longing by feeling.

I encounter Boothby’s lexicon of gestures in a poster produced by the artist Lena Rosa Händle. Her expansive practice often conveys an intention that might be thought of as a poetics of gesture. The poster accompanies her recent installation These Hands – An In­imitable World (2022), exhibited as part of TO BE SEEN: queer lives 1900–1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism (NSDOKU).² The installation comprises three large-scale photographic portraits, made in collaboration with 
Händle’s model, the curator and DJ Tonica Hunter. The black-and-white photographs show Hunter in relaxed clothing, assuming a series of poses in a studio. In each image, Hunter’s hands are promi­nently displayed, forming exaggerated and expressive shapes. Pho­­­­t­­ography is not a world apart from language, in the sense that language circumscribes our being in the world, yet these images shift register to a nonverbal, gestural system of communication.

In the context of an exhibition focused on queer life in the first half of the twentieth century, Händle’s portraits reference a history of modernist art in which the hand is a central trope, including images of the dancer Tilly Losch, the painter Mariette Lydis, and the Surrealist artist Claude Cahun. This coding of multiple temporalities within Händle’s images is heightened by the triangular gesture formed by Hunter’s hands, recalling the visual iconography of second-wave feminism and a long history of the triangle as a symbol for the vagina. Crucially, Händle’s images also recall female-run portrait studios in European centers in the 1920s. Offering economic independence to women photographers, studios became meeting places—emergent public realms in which women could participate and through which an erotic gaze between women became possible.

1 Valery Boothby, “Hände,” Das Leben (November 1929), pp. 21–27, esp. p. 24 (trans. Melanie Newton).
2 The exhibition was curated by Karolina Kühn (head curator), Juliane Bischoff, Angela Hermann, Sebastian Huber, Anna Straetmans, and Ulla-Britta Vollhardt and was on view from October 7, 2022, to May 21, 2023.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 162/2023, pp. 45–56.

LENA ROSA HÄNDLE