The exhibition Voices from Europe bring to Lisbon the diversity of ideas, aesthetics and practices of the Parallel Platform. Each member was invited to propose an artist. The curator Rui Prata assembled the work of these eighteen artists, in a narrative which highlights differences and yet retains coherence.
The creative process for the exhibition Voices from Europe started with an invitation to the Parallel Platform members, requesting them to select the artist who would best represent their aesthetic and artistic practice, values.
Given the wide geographic scope of the Platform, with countries from all over Europe, the results couldn’t be anything other than a rich and diverse set of proposals.
According to their purpose and role within the visual culture world, each of the member organisations, searched for an artist in tune with their thinking. If each one of the series represents, even partially, the identity of the proponent, the whole collection offers us a wide picture of current photography. Thus, the result of the proposals became a complex and exciting challenge. How to assemble such a diversified set of ideas?
How to create a cohesive narrative?
As the projects arrived and doubts dissipated, we tentatively tried several sceneries bringing together all the distinct content and format.
Some of the projects stem from traditional practices, while others follow novel approaches. Some explore identity, a cherished subject in the history of photography, other evoke the possibilities of the medium itself for building memories, while others still, display the emblematic ambiguity of photography.
Paralllel project and its featured exhibition Voices from Europe, stimulate the dissemination of photographic images and the reflection about its genesis and meaning.
The purpose of the project is building a platform of excellence aimed at heightening knowledge and photography practise, through a wide and inclusive exchange of experiences and strategies.
Photographic representation has been associated with multiple functionalities and opened to ‘contamination’ from distinct artistic currents and technologies. This cross influence, has brought about different theories around the medium. The development of the digital process, and its subsequent democratisation and massification, continues to incite widespread discussion with no real conclusions in sight.
Most of the theorists agree as to what concerns the use of traditional elements
of photography: time, light, process, social role, indexicality and, more recently, social media. The divergency is in the way they contextualise and analyse these particular matters.
As paradoxical as it may seem, as the world is becoming saturated with images, it seems that the visual literacy is shrinking. In 2008, Claudia Gianneti, said in a conference: ‘our eye ignores the flesh of the world. It sees graphics instead of reading images’. We are living today under a kind of blinding light. The excess of images of catastrophes, torture, famine or war, so profuse in the press, numb us to the point of immunity. This excess is even more heightened on all our screens. With the growing dominance of social media and their profusion of images, photography acquired a new degree of appreciation where the eye is fleeting and distracted. The observation time became reduced to a ‘like’.
Voices from Europe brings us ample material to reflect upon such matters. The body of work, may and should contribute to a critical assessment of the new ideas being brought forward, which can lead to a wider and richer understanding of the digital image, as well as its potential and role(s) in the history of photography.
Artists
ANDREJS STROKINS
ANTÓNIO JÚLIO DUARTE
BORKO VUKOSAV
DONATAS STANKEVICIUS
EAMONN DOYLE
GAËL BONNEFON
IVAN DVORŠAK
JARI SILOMAKI
JOÃO GRAMA
LASSE KROG MØLLER
LINDA HANSEN
LUKASZ RUSZNICA
MONICA ALCAZAR-DUARTE
NEAK SOPHAL
PHIL TOLEDANO
SZABOLCS BARAKONYI
TIZIANO ROSSANO MAINIERI
ZOÉ VAN DER HAEGEN
Curator