Another Reality (Foto Relations)

The Foto Relations exhibition at Dům Umění in Brno presented photographic works by 12 artists including two projects in the city’s public space consisting of a flag and a billboard.
Three photographs by Ugo Rondinone, “I don’t live here anymore“, question the illusive reality of attractive fashion photographs manipulating the artist’s portrait into the pictures of female models. This ambiguity of the male and the female, “slight photographic defects“ and taking the image out of possible context question established ways of perception. In his series of photographs of stone pits in Carrara, Jacques Berthet avoids making documentary shots but rather consistently searches for perspectives which point out the possible understanding of a place as a space where minimalist art is being created as if by nature itself.
Hannah Villiger constructs abstract compositions out of her body entitled “Block XX”. Their unclear character is dominated over readability of original meanings of the images in such a way that the fact of a human body is no longer significant. In the case of Balthasar Burkhard’s work “Venen/Veins”, it is more clear what part of the body he works with. Still, the four photographs of arms take a human body as a material as well and perceiving its structure is as powerful as perceiving the forms created.
The approach of the artists exhibited shows their wish to look at things differently. They question common perception of reality and we may ask whether its general and unaltered meaning is the right one.

01.02.1998