exhibition opening and discussion

Friday, 8 June at 7 pm at Photon – Centre for Contemporary Photography

19.00: Discussion to be held before the opening of the exhibition Mutations II will deal with issues of relationships between the still and the moving image. Participants will discuss the dimension of time, which is crucial for both media, video and photography.

Speakers: Barbara Borčić, Paul Di Felice, Ida Hiršenfelder and Metka Zupanič

20.00: MUTATIONS II: Moving Stills exhibition opening

MUTATIONS II: Moving Stills

8 June – 27 July 2012

Photon – Centre for Contemporary Photography

Peter Aerschmann / Christoph Brech / Elina Brotherus / Ori Gersht / Tuomo Rainio / Jutta Strohmaier

Mutations II aims to question the principles of video by exploring the productive relationships that have developed between fixed and moving images and providing a sense of where contemporary art stands in Europe today. By abandoning its status as a medium for freezing recorded reality and by borrowing one of its essential features, namely the temporal dimension, from video art, photography is becoming emancipated via all kinds of artistic manipulations and technical hybridizations, both analogue and digital.

The people behind Mutations II have thus chosen to showcase European artists who have in common a taste for experimenting with new forms of expression. Like Nancy Spector in her essay Art Photography after Photography, they have effectively questioned the specific criteria that used to make it possible to draw a distinction between a photographer and an artist working with photography. A growing number of photographers are using video, and this is changing the specific criteria that define both crafts. Apart from the diversity of their aesthetic standpoints and of the visual techniques they use, the artists presented in Mutations II encourage us to step beyond the territorial considerations and academic definitions which tend to ring-fence artistic fields, and to explore the boundaries that separate them. In other words Mutations II invites us to discover new territory, investigating both fixed and moving images via the tensions that motivate them. These include an ontological tension between that which is momentary and that which takes place over time, an aesthetic tension arising from the hybridization of the traditional photographic image and the moving image, and a dialectical tension between the limited display possibilities open to photographs and “the infinity of perceptional combinations within which electronic images can be defined and articulated” (Les nuouvelle images, 2001), particularly video installation.

www.photon.si