Bruno Serralongue — Histoires des avant-dernières luttes — Air de Paris Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 15 → October 21, 2012

Bruno Serralongue’s new solo show at Air de Paris presents a selection of photographs from his recent series: South Sudan 2011, on the official commemoration of the country’s independence; Kosovo 2009, still in preparation, on the construction of a new country in Europe; and Florange 2012, the working title for a series on the industrial dispute at Arcelor Mittal in France.

Serralongue subverts both the procedures of conceptual photography — revealing the complexity of the real more than exhausting its forms — and a certain dematerialisation at work in contemporary art. Triggering a reversal of the usual state of affairs, he renders visible things which otherwise would be no more than media prompts. Despite the overt construction of his images, however, his intention is neither simply formal or even visible.

His way of seeing focuses very much on the veritable historical nature of the events he covers, on the contingency of events which are not self-contained but rather, as he puts it, “endless constructions of possible conflicts via the resolution of the preceding ones.” Here he borrows and tweaks the title of Siegfried Kracauer’s unfinished historical writings, History: The Last Things Before The Last, in images that reveal the full complexity of things and their history: things that are paradoxically intangible in that they reference the endlessly postponed end of history.