ALEXANDRA SYMONS-SUTCLIFFE

Thresholds

A partition slices and diagonally dissects the photographic plane. A white gallery wall, one of several, in a room made of and for flat display surfaces. But we—the viewers—are dealing with the image, not the room. We could say we are at the image; we have encountered its surface. From this angle, and at this dimension, the wall obscures part of a framed photo which is displayed behind it in another section of the gallery. In the partially shown photograph, a young woman, seated, is presenting the screen of her phone to the camera; behind her is a wall of framed pictures. We will meet this woman again later. The obscuring wall is both a partition and a site of presentation. A photograph printed on paper and framed in glass and wood is fixed to it, but the perspective of the camera in relation to the wall does not allow us to see the image’s contents. This is a description of one half a photograph, taken by Niklas Taleb of his own exhibition Live in Paris at the Bonner Kunstverein in Bonn, Germa­ny (2021–22). The remainder of this image shows a gap, beyond it a white hallway indistinguishable from the gallery walls, and then another gap that leads to a door, which is itself cut off by the edge of the pictorial frame.

Another installation shot, from a separate exhibition by Taleb, shows Playgroup (2023), a small photograph on a white wall. Taken from a distance, the larger framing photograph, again, displays yet refuses to allow full access to the object it nominally represents. In this case, the smaller photograph shows two images of the same group of people, from the same shot, cut, and then spliced together. Heads bowed and gathered, they are illuminated by the familiar blue light of a smartphone, though the phone itself is not included in the image. Taleb has divided the sitters’ faces in two and recombined them so that the bottom parts of their faces are placed above the top. The composition gestures to the now outdated celluloid film, rolling from frame to frame. Occupied by their contemporary handheld devices, the sitters seem unaware of Taleb’s presence, though they are in fact acquainted. On the whole, Taleb tends to portray people that he knows well. The exclusion of his lens from their social arrangement places us, the viewers, in a parallel position to him, the photographer, but we are not left there; we draw back, away from the framed object-image into the exterior space of the gallery, and then further to the edge of the magazine page.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 165/2024, pp. 9–20.

GABRIELLE MOSER

Mis-Registrations: Sim Chi Yin’s Photographic Transpositions

“The past, too, needs somewhere to go.” – Sim Chi Yin¹

Sim Chi Yin’s photographic series The Suitcase Is A Little Bit Rotten (2023) takes its name from an act of linguistic mis-registration—a sentence uttered by the artist’s young son, Lucas, as the family was preparing for an upcoming trip. Confusing an inanimate object (one that contains and transports people’s worldly belongings around the globe) with a living organism, the statement feels uncannily true despite its conflation of meanings. After all, it is this same logic—of treating food, animals, and other living beings as commodity objects that can be extracted and circulated—that has driven colonial economies for the past two hundred years: an equation that, as Lucas’s description suggests, seems to have surpassed its usefulness, and might be on the verge of expiring.

The colonial photographic archive—the subject of Sim’s series—is rife with similar kinds of mistakes, super-impositions, and mis-registrations, where projected and real meanings fail to align. Comprising forty photographic glass plates displayed in wood stands, Sim’s manipulated images seek to uncover the slippages between the fantasies of the colonial state, the grounded reality of anti-colonial resistance, and the ongoing return of the imperial past in the present in the form of trans-generational inheritance. Working with found images from commercial and state archives, The Suitcase Is A Little Bit Rotten emerges from the artist’s ten-year-long investigation into the visualization and memorialization of the anti-colonial war in Malaya during the so-called Malayan Emergency (1948–60), a period of armed resistance against British rule that led to her grandfather’s disappearance and death. By enlarging found photographs depicting the British colony of Malaya from the late 1800s and early 1900s and slyly inserting images of her grandfather—a figure who was absented from her family history after he was extradited by the British to China, and killed by Chinese Nationalist Party soldiers in 1949—and of her young son into the scenes, Sim creates a “reconstructed archive of an imaginary Southeast Asian landscape” that refuses to forget her familial ancestry.²

1 Sim Chi Yin, personal conversation with the author, January 16, 2024. 2 Sim Chi Yin, “The (trans-)generational camera,” in Transit, exh. cat. Zilberman Gallery, Berlin, April 29 to July 29, 2023. Text contribution in Camera Austria International 165/2024, pp. 21–32.

NATASHA CHRISTIA

Einverleibungen—Or, On the Object and What Remains

The object and what remains of it mark an obsession in Kabinette (Cabinets, 2018–ongoing), a multibranched project that Sara-Lena Maierhofer produced in response to the rising debate related to colonialism’s obscure imprint on major institutions in Germany and elsewhere. The inclusion of Kabinette in the exhibition Double Exposure, curated by Anna Voswinckel at Camera Austria, has provided me a ground for revisiting an essay I contributed on the subject back in 2021. Maierhofer’s work points to a series of critical multiexposures. The latter relate not merely to the troubled position of the ethnographic museum in the face of ongoing demands for the restitution of looted artifacts to their countries and cultures of origin. They also expose the camera’s complicity with the voyeuristic imperatives of imperial museal displays, while invoking, at the same time, their potential to subvert, rewrite, and inscribe the aforementioned imperatives and their narratives onto a postcolonial frame, by unearthing the lacunae and ghosts of the colonial past.

“First, the time you fell into the belly of the boat. For, in your poetic vision, a boat has no belly; a boat does not swallow up, does not devour; a boat is steered by open skies. Yet, the belly of this boat dissolves you, precipitates you into a nonworld from which you cry out. This boat is a womb, a womb abyss. . . . This boat is your womb, a matrix, and yet it expels you. This boat: pregnant with as many dead as living under sentence of death.”¹

Artifacts from former European colonial territories stored on the shelves and in the drawers of ethnographic museum depots, architectural models of the floor plans of museums where major ethnographic collections are harbored, and emblematic Cubist paintings of early modernism, inspired by the aesthetics of African sculpture comprise the palimpsest of elements that Sara-Lena Maierhofer’s Kabinette brings together, appropriates, and reinvents to negotiate the object as a witness to the past and a means to forge memory. Rather than adhering to individual cases of items with a pronounced ritual or memorial significance claimed for restitution, she focuses on stirring the debris of anonymous, impersonalized artifacts that lie muted in oblivion, in the reservoirs of large ethnographic museums. Her visual strategy, which is one of exteriority and form, becomes a means of accessing and studying the sediment of cognition, remembrance, and forgetfulness that constitutes the ideological core of the institution and its imperial baggage.

1 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 6.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 165/2024, pp. 33–44.

CARA LERCHL

Painting Beside Herself

In his essay “Painting Beside Itself” (2009), art historian David
Joselit examines the role of painting in contemporary art and inquires into painting’s place in a broader network. To Joselit’s mind, the “most important problem to be addressed on canvas since Warhol”¹ was identified by Martin Kippenberger in the 1990s: “Simply to hang a painting on the wall and say that it’s art is dreadful. The whole network is important! Even spaghettini . . . . When you say art, then everything possible belongs to it. In a gallery that is also the floor, the architecture, the color of the walls.”² Joselit writes about a break with painting’s conventions and tradition and highlights a group of artists with an international presence in the new millennium who can be traced back to Kippenberger and the Cologne School. Moreover, he emphasizes Kippenberger’s analysis as both truth and metaphor, as social interaction over food and drink can turn into a chaos of consumption and exchange.

This so-called “transitive painting” in which painted canvas, installation, and performance overlap and create a transition between the medium and social networks is of central importance to Lisa Holzer’s work. The Berlin-based artist moves between figuration and abstraction and in various media including photography, text, and related performative gestures; she inscribes herself into the concept of the network Joselit lays out as a chain of associations and working methods. Tears, sweat, and leftover food are depicted as liquids that cite abstract painting and ironize it, bringing desire and lack into play. In the context of poststructuralist psychoanalysis, Holzer’s works address language, structures of desire, and inquiries into the medium of photography, and turn out to be humorous negotiations in which images become protagonists.

While in past series (such as Trauben, 2019; Guts, 2019; and Not yet titled, 2016) grapes dipped in white chocolate, mashed avocado, or pureed lentils reminiscent of excrement or concrete3 sometimes turn out to be Photoshopped photographs of food taken to the point of formlessness, they also convey emotion.

1 David Joselit, “Painting Beside Itself,” October, 130 (2009), p. 125. 2 “One Has to Be Able to Take It!,” interview between Martin Kippenberger and Jutta Koether in Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, exh. cat. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), p. 316. Quoted in Joselit, “Painting Beside Itself.”
3 Lisa Holzer, Esst mich! A Reader, exh. cat. Kunstverein München, Munich
(Vienna: Westphalie, 2019), p. 14.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 165/2024, pp. 45–56.