V1 GALLERY PROUDLY PRESENTS
SPITTING IMAGE - A GROUP EXHIBITION OF PHOTOGRAPHERS
Asger Carlsen (DK/US), Julian Röder (DE), Kasper Sonne (DK/UK), Peter Sutherland (US), Peter Beste (US), Peter Funch (DK/US), Marie Jan Lund & Nina Jan Beier (DK/UK), Nicholas Prior (US), Syoin Kajii (JP)
V1 Gallery proudly presents Spitting Image, a photo exhibition with 10 select artists from USA, UK, Japan, Denmark and Germany.
A photo can work as a mapping and a question mark. Young photographers today neither monopolize 'the truth' nor proclaim 'the end of the real'. Instead they use the photograph as an invitation to reflect on the viewer's subjective experiences of his or her surroundings.
The intention with Spitting Image is to show the enormous potential of the photo medium. The exhibition gathers young artists, who with their innovative approach to photography, have resounded on the international contemporary art scene.
At the exhibition you can travel to the suburbs with indie hero Peter Sutherland and his dreamlike pictures of deer caught in the light of Sutherland's flash. Like a possessed hunter he has shot thousands of pictures of deer roaming the man made border between nature and city. The gentle and innocent looking animals meet their antithesis in the much-admired photographer Peter Beste's look into the blackmetal scene in Norway, where death is life. The musicians gloomy faces are framed by a vulnerable vanity that contrasts Norway's naked scenery.
From Norway Spitting Image shifts to New York and the second volume of Peter Funch's photo project Babel Tales, a collection of poetic short stories from the streets of New York. Funch confuses the borders between staged photography and documentary photography, and in doing so he expands both terms. Nina Jan Beier and Marie Jan Lund play the same game with staged photography - here, however, it is the people in the pictures, who stage themselves.
Kasper Sonne also plays with the photographer's authority. Thus he exhibits pictures of a work he has created on a rooftop in London. Sonne is not the photographer however instead he has downloaded the displayed pictures from the internet. In this way he not only challenges his own participation in Spitting Image, he also gives way to Joseph Beuys' idea of 'Jeder Mensch ein Künstler'. The use of the expanded notion of art is also present in Julian Röder's potent political tales. Using the formal press photography he reports subjectively from the global village, where rich and poor, rebel and authority, system and anarchy meet. From Röder's stories Spitting Image turns to Nicholas Prior's psychological portraits of children in adult settings. The eeriness in the pictures is not unlike the atmosphere in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. In contrast hereto, Asger Carlsen takes on the role as the child among grown-ups by manipulating serious press photographs. The result is tragicomic and almost creepy, and pays homage to Chris Cunningham's strange creatures and David Lynch's surreal scenes. As a calming counterpart prize winning photographer Syoin Kajii exhibits his beautiful waves, referring to Hokusai's famous waves in front of Mt. Fuji. With this motif Kajii comments on the relationship between old traditions and modern Japanese culture and at the same time he gives the camera the same artistic authority as the paint brush.
Spitting Image takes the temperature on young contemporary art photography, and at the same time the exhibition is a celebration of the individual innovative photographers. The title of the exhibition refers to the traditional perception of the photography as a replication of reality. Peter Funch has curated Spitting Image.
