The Witness

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival

Image activated by augmented reality, where 3D animated subjects and scenarios are integrated into a physical photograph. Inspired by the work of Carl Jung, the image is part of a larger series that explores themes such as identity, introspection and transformation. Through AR, game elements were introduced into the piece, offering virtual content unlockable through interactions.

Bio

Camila Magrane is a Venezuelan-American visual artist known for her augmented reality images, integrating 3D animated scenes and subjects into physical photographs. With experience in video game development and a passion for analog photography, she explores the dialogue between the virtual and physical worlds. Magrane’s images are inspired by surrealist compositions and reference the graphic hyperrealism of contemporary video game design.

Berenike Corcuera’s collection was inspired by kirilian photographs of her aura, first captured in Chinatown’s reowned Magic Jewelry. when she lived in New York in 2014. She began studying the electromagnetic field of the human body to understand how to translate the invisible. She began the practice of mandala and colour studies, to understand how metaphysical bodies could be interpreted into physical bodies and contemporary menswear clothing.

Anarchitecture

splitting house

“Of the many shows at the fabled 112 Greene Street gallery—an artistic epicenter of New York’s downtown scene in the 1970s—the Anarchitecture group show of March 1974 has been the subject of the most enduring discussion, despite a complete lack of documentation about it. Anarchitecture has become a foundational myth, but one that remains to be properly understood. Stemming from a series of meetings organized by Gordon Matta-Clark and reflecting his long-standing interest in architecture, the Anarchitecture exhibition was conceived as an anonymous group statement in photographs about the intersection of art and building. But did it actually happen? It exists only through oblique archival traces and the memories of the participants. Cutting Matta-Clark investigates the Anarchitecture group as a kind of collective research seminar, through extensive interviews with the protagonists and a dossier of all the available evidence. The dossier includes a collection of Matta-Clark’s aphoristic “art cards,” the 96 photographs that were produced by the various participants for possible inclusion in the exhibition, and images from a recently unearthed video of Matta-Clark’s now famous bus trip to see Splitting in Englewood, New Jersey.” Mark Wigley

Presence and Erasure
Presence and Erasure is a portrait machine that explores the reality of automated facial recognition and how people relate to their self-image, instinctively and emotionally. Within a given spatial domain, the artwork constantly scans for faces in the vicinity and photographs them. When the artwork’s algorithm detects a certain quality within a photograph, this image is temporarily printed at large scale by exposing a photochromic surface to light impulses. Each automated portrait remains for little more than a minute, before gradually dissolving into blankness. RANDOM INTERNATIONAL began to combine transient mark-making with automated portraiture early on in their practice, in 2008. Presence and Erasure marks the latest development in this body of work and assumes a minimal, industrial aesthetic that references their earliest studies on this theme. The physical impact of facial recognition and machine vision is emphasised by the exposure of the printing process itself, contrasted against the aesthetic of the high resolution portraits generated. RANDOM INTERNATIONAL intend this as a counter to the perception of surveillance footage as always being low quality, aiming to create a deeper reflection on the nature of surveillance today as well as the resounding cognitive and emotional dissonances.

جورج ريدهاوك
乔治·红鹰

file festival
Native American GIF artist George Redhawk aka DarkAngel0ne, who is blind, uses them to “see” art. With the help of visual aides and using photo manipulation software designed for the visually impaired, Redhawk creates eerily captivating versions of his favorite paintings and photographs.

Wall in Blue Ash Tree

“I think that nature as a subject is often seen as something outdated or cliché in contemporary art and especially in nature photos. But I think there is still a lot of scope to play and push the boundaries, “Letha Wilson said. She thus dust off the subject through installations, videos and photo-sculptures and breathe new life into the gallery.
Using photography as a material in its own right, she shakes up conventions and does not hesitate to manipulate her photographs and associate them with other elements such as wood, paint, light or more recently, concrete, giving them a new dimension. One way for her to suggest that the viewer question the desire to be elsewhere and the representation of nature. Letha plays on the fragile balance that exists between the beauty of her images and their sculptural strength and thus creates relationships between nature, objects, exhibition space and wild landscapes. »Géraldyne Masson.

Lost Dimension
Lost Dimension Non-dimensional Cities is an immersive cinematic experience in which participants journey through an endlessly unfolding virtual cityscape that expands over all axes. This dimensionless cityscape is constructed from a large collection of point clouds and sounds. While the user is standing on the controller pod and navigates through this virtual world, a sense of physical instability takes over and the platform becomes an anchor to hold on to. The building blocks of the world are generated from depth map information and panoramic photographs obtained from Google Street View’s API. Depending on the user’s position in the virtual world these blocks are dynamically repositioned on a three-dimensional grid. By subtle manipulation of motion and sound, perspective distortion and shifts in balance Lost Dimension unquestionably re-calibrates the viewer’s perception of dimensionality.

Flow Through

“Flow Through takes as its departure point Bahar Yürükoğlu’s experiences during her travels to the Arctic Circle in 2015, both in the summertime, when the sun doesn’t set, and during the winter months, when darkness prevails. In the exhibition, the artist creates fictional spaces based on the dualities she observed in the Arctic region; blurring the boundaries between presence and absence, past and future, nature and civilisation, as well as cyclical movements and inevitable transformations, these installations, photographs and videos test the viewer’s perceptive capacities, and demand that the dichotomy between the subject and the object is set aside”. Duygu Demir

Shorter than the Day
The New York-based artist captures the sky as it changes from cerulean blue morning to a colorful sunset to the many shades of night through nearly 1,000 photographs of the sky. Each printed image is fastened to the aluminum and steel with alligator clips and is revealed as viewers move around the massive work, just like the earth circles the sun to mark a day.

towards universal recognition

“Shaw  presents Towards Universal Pattern Recognition, a series of archival photographs framed under custom-machined prismatic acrylic. The works, which he calls optical sculptures, depict people in transcendent states accessed through prayer, dance, yoga and the like. They act as a preview to the videos, which are projected in meticulously constructed spaces, each with eight office chairs facing a single screen.” Diana Hiebert

Dutch-Croatian photographer Sanja Marušić uses an experimental approach to colour, composition, materials, and manipulations in her work to create dreamlike scenes that are at once cinematic and alienating.She travels the world in her production of these otherworldly images, finding settings and forms that play with our relation to the subconscious, simplifying the bodies of her subjects with geometric shapes, and abstracting the human form even further by incorporating stylised dance movements.Putting places above people, many of Sanja’s photographs are set in wide open futuristic spaces in an attempt to create surreal and alienating visual emotions. She often uses cool and bright colours as well as singular objects and accessories in order to create unique and enigmatic narratives.

Wrapped up
With her installations, sculptures and photographs, Dutch artist Guda Koster transforms the human body and attaches a new identity to her characters or to herself, using clothing as the main visual art form, patterns and colours to create surreal stories.

From Apple to Anomaly
Artist Trevor Paglen’s new Curve commission takes as its starting point the way in which AI networks are taught how to ‘see’ and ‘perceive’ the world by taking a closer look at image datasets. Paglen has incorporated approximately 30,000 individually printed photographs, largely drawn from ImageNet, the most widely shared, publicly available dataset. This dataset is archived and pre-selected in categories by humans, and widely used for training AI networks. In some cases, the connotations of categories are uncontroversial, others, for example ‘bad person’ or ‘debtors’, are not. These categories, when used in AI, suggest a world in which machines will be able to elicit forms of judgement against humankind.

Energie!
Thorsten Fleisch creates films that reveal the shapes and patterns of natural forces and phenomena. In this work he reveals what energy in one of its simplest forms looks like in motion. Energie! is a sequence of still images created on light-sensitive photographic paper. The artist exposed dozens of sheets of paper to enormous electrical discharges, each leaving its imprint as a trail of light. Animating these images reveals patterns in their flow of energy, akin to tracing the flow of electricity at each moment of a lightning strike. As the images are photographs created without cameras, they are records of single moments. Accordingly we see dozens of split-second documents animated to reveal the shape and power of energy.

ニックナイト
НИК НАЙТ
ניק נייט
닉 나이트
Nick Knight is one of the most sought after fashion and editorial photographers in the world today. His first photographs however were focused on an entirely different field. In the 1970s, he took a documentary approach in recording the Skinhead movement popular among youths at that time. He also has a keen interest in pressed flowers and plants

All above
Guda Koster is a Dutch artist who creates living sculptures and performances, which the photographs are the results of. Koster’s works are created in parallels of time, space and textile. In her works Koster uses fabrics, colours and patterns that underline the codes and meanings our clothing conveys.

birdgirl
It’s hard to pin down what media German artist Alma Haser actually works with: Her series involve photography, cut-up collages, rephotographing prints, and weaving together multiple images to strike a balance of time and space. Take I Always Have To Repeat Myself, for example. Each piece layers two or more prints either physically (weaving or overlaying strips of different photographs to add a sense of depth and dimension) or within a new frame—a number of the pieces feature sitters manipulating photographs of themselves, playing with perspective to offer and dizzying and disorienting fresh take on portraiture and image making.

ЮНГ ЧЕНГ ЛИН
يونغ تشنغ لين

The photographic experiments of the Taiwanese artist Yung Cheng Lin, aka 3cm, who confronts the human anatomy to external elements such as red thread or simple fruits, imagining surreal and geometric compositions. Some intense and disturbing conceptual photographs, which question our relation to the body and organic matter.

Through photographs, sculpture, video, song, costume and performance, Cuenca explores the fragile structure of political hegemony and patriarchal domination.

Andrea Delo Toro Sicsik is a Mexican photographer based in Torreón, Coahuila. Her digitally modified photographs make from unbelievably beautiful and bizarre works of art.

compositie met oranje cirkel
Guda Koster is a Dutch artist who creates living sculptures and performances, which the photographs are the results of. Koster’s works are created in parallels of time, space and textile.In her works Koster uses fabrics, colours and patterns that underline the codes and meanings our clothing conveys.

ЮНГ ЧЕНГ ЛИН
يونغ تشنغ لين

The photographic experiments of the Taiwanese artist Yung Cheng Lin, aka 3cm, who confronts the human anatomy to external elements such as red thread or simple fruits, imagining surreal and geometric compositions. Some intense and disturbing conceptual photographs, which question our relation to the body and organic matter.

Stormy weather
Guda Koster is a Dutch artist who creates living sculptures and performances, which the photographs are the results of. Koster’s works are created in parallels of time, space, and textile. In her works, Koster uses fabrics, colors, and patterns that underline the codes and meanings our clothing conveys.

Last Child in the Woods
In her work, Melanie Bonajo examines the paradoxes inherent to ideas of comfort with a strong sense for community, equality, and body-politics. Through her videos, performances, photographs and installations, she studies subjects related to how technological advances and commoditybased pleasures increase feelings of alienation, removing a sense of belonging in an individual. Captivated by concepts of the divine, Bonajo explores the spiritual emptiness of her generation, examines peoples’ shifting relationship with nature and tries to understand existential questions by reflecting on our domestic situation, ideas around classification, concepts of home, gender and attitudes towards value.

Me as Eva Hesse
Throughout the past two decades, Gillian Wearing’s films, photographs and sculptures have investigated public personas and private lives. Since the beginning of her career, the artist has drawn from techniques of theater, reality television and fly-on-the-wall documentary-making to construct narratives that explore personal fantasies and confessions, individual traumas, cultural histories, and the role of the media. Anonymity through elaborate masks, costumes and role-play has remained a critical part of Wearing’s practice and influential investigation of the ways in which individuals present themselves to others when the self is temporarily concealed.

МЯО СЯОЧУНЬ
缪晓春
مياو شياو تشون
last judgment in cyberspace (detail)
Printed in black and white. Miao’s photos conceive the celestial as a silvery futuristic tableau that’s enchantingly serene and threateningly industrial. In combining the sublime awe of religious painting with malevolent science fiction theme, Miao uses photography to engage the viewer in an ultra-modern way. In using digital process to create his subject ‘from scratch’, Miao’s photographs authenticate a virtual world rather than document reality. Similar to video game graphics and ‘screen shots’, Miao’s images involve the viewer by casting them as ‘avatars’ within the action.

МЯО СЯОЧУНЬ
缪晓春
مياو شياو تشون
The Last Judgment in Cyberspace
虚拟最后审判
In his latest body of work, The Last Judgement in Cyberspace, Miao Xiaochun appropriates Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco as territory for similar provocation. Developed on computer, Miao has built a virtual model of the Apocalypse, architecturally structuring the tiers of Christian afterlife. Replacing each of the 400 figures in Michelangelo’s iconic work with his own image and placing them in corresponding pose and position to the original painting, Miao ‘photographs’ the scene from various vantages, ‘documenting’ the Second Coming from viewpoints both within and outside of the scene.

Tobias Hutzler, a photographer / director based in New York City, creates photographs that showcase sculpture-like forms outlined by live human bodies. The unusual portraits, (because I have no idea of what else to call them) feature men and women in skin toned underwear, posing on top, near, and next to each other in strange, and involved poses.

VLISCO HOMMAGE À L’ART
The Hommage à l’Art series was commissioned by Vlisco and it honours Vlisco’s art by placing their heritage of iconic drawings in the spotlight. These drawings were recreated into icons as gold statues in photographs inspired by Vlisco’s heritage and the women who wear Vlisco fabrics in a proud, almost regal way, as in royal portraiture.

infinity
filefestival
“Paths are made by walking.” In order to determine whether the above phrase was actually true, Yamashita and Kobayashi kept running in a park for five days. In the fast-forward movie compiled from digital photographs taken one per second, a path with the shape of infinity gradually emerges as they move in high-speed.

ジェシカ·イートン
杰西卡·伊顿
polytopes
Jessica Eaton’s photographs dissect chemical and optical phenomena, the materiality of film, and the language of light itself. Eaton came to international acclaim through her Cubes for Albers and LeWitt (commonly referred to by the acronym cfaal)—a series of vibrant photographs that deconstruct her studio practice. Like the majority of Eaton’s works, these optically charged images are made by taking multiple in-camera exposures of common studio supplies. Through her abundant use of traditional analog photography practices—such as colour-separation filtering and in-camera masking—Eaton imbues her large-format images with an aesthetic more reminiscent of the paintings and drawings of hard-edge geometric abstraction than the photographs of traditional studio work.

루드 반 엠펠
Рууд ван Эмпель
Van Empel’s working method is a complex one. He photographs 4 or 5 professional models in his studio, and takes many series of detailed photos of leaves, flowers, plants and animals. Having gathered hundreds of pictures in a database, he selects those images with which he can achieve the best results. The models are mixed in the Photoshop program, clothes are photographed separately on a tailor’s dummy. In this way he creates new images of mainly children, black or white, set in a paradisaical environment.

Losing dots
via highlike submit
Cristina loves experimenting with light, colours, space, and female figures to create poetic photographs. At the first glance, the images seems to be rather static, but they embody a rich story behind every singular detail. The muses, which are mysterious young ladies, are captured by the artist in a minimal environment.

Double Imposition
Daniel Lefcourt’s monochromatic works criticize and dismantle the processes of painting itself: its inspirations, its materials, and the spaces in which it occurs. Using source material such as photographs of the trash in his studio, Lefcourt creates indecipherable surfaces in low relief that hover between abstract and representational, as well as flat versus textured; The New Yorker has called the artist’s conceptual practice “a surrender to mystery.”

МЯО СЯОЧУНЬ
缪晓春
مياو شياو تشون
THE FAR SHORE
Miao Xiaochun was born in 1964 in Wuxi, China. He undertook an MFA at Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China graduating in 1989, before embarking on a second MFA at the Kunsthochschule Kassel, Kassel, Germany, graduating in 1999. An influential figure in China’s wave of new media art, Miao Xiaochun is an artist primarily concerned with appropriation and East-West dialogue. For example, his photographs, assembled through a computer program, are sprawling panoramas of China’s social masses.

Crossing the Farther Shore
In Crossing the Farther Shore, Lê incorporates photographs taken in Vietnam during the 1940s-1980s, with the majority dating to the pre-Vietnam War era before 1975. The images are those that might fill a family’s photo album: portraits, scenic vistas, birthdays, and holidays. Lê has collected pre-1975 Vietnam photographs for years, finding them in antique stores and second-hand shops and wondering, why are there so many abandoned photographs? Lê considers them to be an important record documenting the everyday lives of Southern Vietnamese people – how they dressed, looked, and felt. Such photos are one of the few records of South Vietnam that have escaped from the Northern Vietnamese communist government’s systematic effort to erase the pre-1975 existence of the South.

泽维尔底洛瑞
Ксавье Делори
Formes Urbaines, or Urban Forms, is the brainchild of photographer Xavier Delory, who states that the purpose of this ongoing project is “to study the recurrent characteristics of modern cities.” At first glance, the viewer considers whether the buildings in his images are real, though a prolonged study assures us that indeed, this is a commentary on the evolution of modern architecture. The wafer-thin office building, the façades that lack their buildings behind them, an apartment house that screams whimsy with its inverse construction, the biggest flat on top—all of these images were created from actual photographs and then digitally manipulated to achieve the desired effect.

In photographs and video installations, Sebastian Stumpf tests the boundaries of his environment and oversteps them seemingly effortlessly. His selfdramatizations call into question the relationship between body and space. Short video sequences document physical actions that Stumpf executes. These performances do not take place live in the exhibition space but are projected as already-completed works at the exact site where they were originally staged: video work and projection space thus overlap and merge.

フィリップ·ラメット
Филиппа Рамета
Born in 1961, Philippe Ramette is a French conceptual artist who plays with the viewer’s mind. Ramette creates gravity-defying photographs that appear to be digitally manipulated, using cleverly designed weight-bearing structures (or lead weights for the underwater shots), but in fact they are real world settings that were carefully arrangement, in order to achieve these impressive scenes. In Ramette’s surreal photography, surrealism literally invades reality.

Other Rooms
Since she emerged in the late 1970s as one of the first important practitioners of the “fabricated photographs” movement, Jo Ann Callis has made adventurous contributions in the areas of color photography, sculpture, painting, and digital imagery. For her, photography is another studio tool to be used, along with the sets she creates and the models she directs, to render the sensual tones and textures of fabric and food, or to animate clay figures of her own making. The persistent inventiveness of Callis’s work has made her a force in Southern California art and in recent photographic practice.

Eric Kellerman is a Briton who has lived near Nijmegen in the Netherlands for a very long time. In 2008, he retired from academia to spend more time on photography.
Specialising in the nude, he works almost entirely in the studio with a regular team of female collaborators, most of whom have a serious interest in movement (dance, acrobatics, yoga, martial arts). Sometimes, when nobody is available, he photographs vegetables and fruit out of desperation.

梅拉妮·柏娜桥
progress
Melanie Bonajo exams the paradoxes inherent in our future-based ideas of comfort. Through her photographs, performances, videos and installations Bonajo examines subjects related to progress that remove from the individual a sense of belonging and looks at how technological advances and commodity-based pleasures increase feelings of alienation within the individual. Captivated by concepts of the divine, she explores the spiritual emptiness of her generation, examines peoples’ shifting relationship with nature and tries to understand existential questions by looking at our domestic situation, idea’s around classification, concepts of home, gender and attitudes towards value.

Marcelo Moscheta is an artist based in Campinas, Brazil. As a traveler who looks at the world like the romantics of the 19th Century or the Great Explorers of the Artic, he has made installations, drawings and photographs born from his time in remote locations. Through uncommon materials and techniques his works addresses the notion of ephemerality and mankind’s efforts to understand and recreate physical and geographical aspects found in natural environments. He is interested in the landscape as a representational system from where man can measure his own world. Drawing, printmaking, photography and installations are his main media.

ЮНГ ЧЕНГ ЛИН
يونغ تشنغ لين

The photographic experiments of the Taiwanese artist Yung Cheng Lin, aka 3cm, who confronts the human anatomy to external elements such as red thread or simple fruits, imagining surreal and geometric compositions. Some intense and disturbing conceptual photographs, which question our relation to the body and organic matter.

VETERANS OF THE WARS OF YOUGOSLAVIA, BOSNIA, KOSOVO, SERBIA & SOMALIA FACING THE CORNER
Santiago Sierra’s third solo exhibition at Team Gallery, Veterans, displays nine photographs of war veterans standing in corners. All that is visible are the backs of their bodies; their hands are clasped either behind or in front of them. Some are in uniform, and some are not. Some are accessorized, wearing for example, a watch or cowboy hat. One veteran in particular stands in plain clothes holding a cane, signifying a possible combat wound.

Саманта Доннелли
Samantha Donnelly’s practice is concerned with breaking down subjects and reconfiguring them in new constellations. Bringing together appropriated ephemera and quotidian materials such as magazines or cut-out photographs to produce assemblages, Donnelly reworks material remnants from various areas of contemporary culture, allowing them to dialogue and resonate within the same piece. By drawing our attention to surface and formal elements such as composition and colour, Donnelly’s work often references art history, particularly Modernism and the Baroque.

My new sculpture oh what a feeling
Distressed by the lack of representation for people of color in art history and museums and galleries, Awol Erizku aims to rectify this omission in his photographs, sculptures, and video installations, which are centered upon subjects of color. In his words, “There are not that many colored people in the galleries that I went to [growing up] or the museums that I went to. I was just like, when I become an artist I have to put my two cents in this world.” He does this in a critically acclaimed series of photographic portraits, re-crafting famous painted portraits by artists like Vermeer and Caravaggio by replacing their white subjects with contemporary black ones. By re-staging these and other iconic works of art, Erizku engages in critical discourse with the past, cracking open the canon with historically repressed voices.

باتريسيو دي رينزو
ПАТРИЦИО ДИ РЕНЦО
Pure Poison
From photographs to cinema, black and white to colors, true to false, the approach of Patrizio Di Renzo is eclectic and subtle. Patrizio is very meticulous to the shape and the staging of his subject, maybe the specific touch of the fashion photographer. Patrizio expresses his taste for representing his mysterious path, which is often explored by numerous artists. Patrizio Di Renzo might create his photographs as he explored the ways of his own secret world. He wishes to keep away from realism, from details of ordinary life, to take us to an imaginary world, sometimes fantastic. It seems that his creativity leads him to new horizons. His creations cannot by defined in a particular current.

Mirror stick study
“I am a visual artist and an architect, and my work is informed by both of these disciplines. My background in architecture is the underpinning for my art practice, providing my first sustained exposure to the issues and questions that I currently contend with in my photographs. The questions that I ask through my work are about the nature of spatial perception, and the tools that I use are rooted in the abstract, formal language of making that I developed as an architect.”

АНДРЕАС ГУРСКИ
안드레아스 거스키
安德烈亚斯·古尔斯基
أندرياس غورسكي
アンドレアスことスキー
אנדריאס גורסקי
Bahrain
Andreas Gursky makes large-scale, colour photographs distinctive for their incisive and critical look at the effect of capitalism and globalisation on contemporary life. Gursky studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in the early 1980s and first adopted a style and method closely following Becher’s systematic approach to photography, creating small, black-and-white prints.