Thursday, October 1, 2015

Broomberg & Chanarin at LISSON GALLERY London


Broomberg & Chanarin
Comedy is a man in trouble, 2015

Viewing now until 31 October at London's LISSON GALLEY is a show from Broomberg and Chanarin - Rudiments.
The gallery says this: Tackling politics, religion, war and history, Broomberg and Chanarin prise open the fault lines associated with such imagery, creating new responses and pathways towards an understanding of the human condition. Trained as photographers they now work across diverse media, reacting to the photojournalistic experience of being embedded with the British Army in Afghanistan (and the controlled access to frontline action therein) with an absurd, conceptual riposte, composed of a series of abstract, six-metre swathes of photographic paper exposed to the sun for 20 seconds, for the work The Day Nobody Died (2008). Through painstaking restitution of found objects or imagery, from the long-lost set and discarded footage of the film Catch-22 in Mexico, for example, Broomberg and Chanarin enact an archeology or exorcism of aesthetic and ideological constructs behind the accepted tropes of visual culture, laying bare its foundations for fresh interpretation. Language and literature play an increasing role as material for their multifaceted work, from the philosophical underpinnings in Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer to the sacred texts of the Holy Bible itself, both books having been refashioned and recreated by the artists in their own ambiguous, combatant image.

You can go to Broomberg and Chanarin's site HERE and LISSON GALLERY HERE.


Broomberg & Chanarin
Snoop Dogg, Sylvester Stallone, Sugar Ray Leonard, American Landscapes, 2009

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