Giorgio Di Noto, Tiane Doan na Champassak & Eduardo Serafim — Matière visible  — LWS Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 24 → July 27, 2013

The major development of monitoring technologies and their spreading to the private sphere are linked to an instant and continous web diffusion. In addition, there has been a proliferation of research or image and video-sharing websites for the past ten years. This pooling of images gives the artist a new access to visual resources. This fact has caused a new way of producing and seeing contemporary photography, of thinking the relathionship between images and presence and of questioning links between photography and power.

In the context of digital ‘appropriationism’ Giorgio Di Noto, Tiane Doan na Champassak and Eduardo Serafim offer us new attempts at producing images and documenting reality. The various artistic approaches exposed here reflect many questions relating to photography and politics, arts and documentation.

The purpose then is to confront visions sometimes conveying opposite trends but exploring common topics. On the one hand, the extreme monitoring, the transparency of contemporary reality against the eye of power — vision from above -, and on the other hand, the full accessibility to production, the flow of images and the development of another look — vision from below. The Orwellian vision of Big Brother is now part of a hypertechnological version of panopticism, in which power is related to the private and public space control, but above all to the visibility and control of images. It faces a hyperdemocratisation offering the possibility to document and share images. This period is remarkable as everyone can record and largely make its story visible.

The three series presented in this exhibition follow this same logic of digital appropriationism allowed by a hyper-accessibility to other’s images. Giorgio Di Noto, Tiane Doan na Champassak and Eduardo Serafim make then use of the rich content offered by the Internet. They choose to recycle what already exists by taking over what displays on their screen and transforming it. Their work is thus part of a logic which has been in place for more than a century in the field of art: desacralizing the artistic know-how in favour of celebrating the artist’s choice.

Both Looters (Tiane Doan na Champassak) and I Wish you Where Here (Eduardo Serafim) series take as point of departure images taken from public (Looters) and private (IWYWH) monitoring cameras. The instrument of control is diverted here and offers a new point of view in order to observe and discuss the control reality, rethink and problematize the vision meaning.

Giorgio Di Noto is working from images produced by the main players of the Arab Springs themselves in order to create an imaginary tale of Arab revolts, without having any contact with the event places nor players. This is, in fact, a visual test about photography, snapshot photographs, photojournalism and images property rights. Giorgio Di Noto does not attempt to revolutionize photojournalism but he is at least evaluating its use. With The Arab Revolt, he takes cognizance of the digital development and deriving amateur activities.