Lena Amuat & Zoë Meyer — À propos — Slash Paris

The way photography is used doubtless underpins a modern belief: in the scientific and documentary fields photography’s supposed eyewitness value puts it on an equal footing with the real thing. In their gleefully disbelieving investigation of the image Swiss artists Lena Amuat & Zoë Meyer bypass its link to the referent, using photography’s own tools to retrace the history of science and culture via their means of representation. Begun in 2009, the Matematische Modelle series has been delving into museum storage facilities and exhuming all sorts of geometrical curiosities — models or maquettes (the title of the series is deliberately ambiguous) — standing for a given mathematical concept. Parallel series comprise objects relating to ethnography or archaeology, when they’re not educational tools. All of them, though, look into the fabrication of knowledge down the ages and the processes of its transmission; plus, how these bodies of knowledge are displayed and, by extension, received, interpreted and replayed, with aesthetics laying down the law. The shooting process is as meticulous as for any museum inventory, except that it solely concerns the artefacts’ formal beauty and colours, both insistently underscored by the background and framing. Which means that what the artefacts are modelling remains mysterious. An impossible appropriation — which inspired the dark masses of the Verlorene Sammlung series that represent the absence of a lost collection of ceramics. This platonic conjuring trick, in which the double takes the place of the original, is central to the Swiss pair’s practice. The images they produce display, with their own kind of humour, all kinds of anachronisms, errors of scale and other distortions. And behind the veneer of an enquiry — immediately sabotaged by its own methods — each exhibition becomes the locus of deliberately uncertain calibrations, like a life-size photograph.

— Antoine Camenen for L’ahah, 2019.
(English translation : John Tittensor)