New tactics for Unseen Bodies

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New tactics for Unseen Bodies

From May 06, 2022 16:00 to June 26, 2022 17:00

Opening:

Posted by Galleri Image

New tactics for Unseen Bodies

Opening: 6 May 4-6 pm
Artists: Michelle Eistrup (DK/JM), Juan Covelli (CO) Alinka Echeverria (UK/MX) and Alexandra Leykauf (DE). 

How do we relate to the heritage of images, objects, and histories that our society has been built on? And how do we make the best use of them in our time? Four artists attempt to answer these questions in a new exhibition at Galleri Image, which opens on May 6.

You cannot wipe the slate of history clean. As humans, we are products of history and must either reproduce or transform the images we have received from previous generations into something that we can build our future on. The exhibition New Tactics for Unseen Bodies shows four international, award-winning artists’ work with our visual heritage through photography, video and collage. The artworks in the exhibition all concern themselves with the relationship between visibility and invisibility through the photographic medium, since it is though photography that we can ensure our own visibility, which allows us access to power and identity. The artists in New Tactics for Unseen Bodies create surprising transformations of bodies, landscapes, and ancient objects as tactical suggestions for how to challenge the positions of archives and collections - and in all these artworks the human body is present.

Michelle Eistrup (DK/JM), Juan Covelli (CO), Alinka Echeverria (UK/MX) and Alexandra Leykauf (DE) work with issues that reach both within and beyond Europe's borders. Alinka Echeverria's work "Nicéphora" stems from her research in the Nicéphore Niépce Museum's vast collection of historical photographs. Through thousands of photographs, she discovered a problematic pattern: Women were not depicted as individuals but were staged from an underlying conception of womanhood. In the exhibition's impressive 7-metre-long collage work, she has gathered images of women from antiquity onwards, thus making the pattern visible.The work of Colombian artist Juan Covelli - a large video work created with machine learning - works more indirectly with photography. By feeding an algorithm with photographs of ancient Colombian gold figures, he has created the work "Speculative Treasures", which allows the Colombian cult figure of the Quimbaya culture to symbolically break out of a Spanish museum collection.

New Tactics for Unseen Bodies is part of a global movement that sensually and critically uses today's media and gazes to process our contemporary self-understanding as historical and bodily beings. The four artists in the exhibition have distinguished themselves internationally in their work with the photographic image and related media, such as sculpture, video, installation, and computer generated images. The exhibition is complemented by events in collaboration with LiteratureXchange and Art Week Aarhus.

Galleri Image is proud to present the exhibition, which is the second in a series of exhibitions entitled New Tactics and examines how visual artists create works that act as tactical responses to changes in the relationship between body, identity, and photography in our visual culture. New Tactics is curated by artist and MA in Visual Culture Kirstine Autzen. The first, New Tactics - Moving in a Soft Field (2018), examined the relationship between photography and the body in the post-photographic era, and was part of the Photo Biennial 2018. 

EVENTS

Symposium: "New Tactics"
Thursday 16 June, Kunsthal Aarhus, J. M. Mørks Gade 13, 8000 Aarhus
How do artists push for our understanding of identity? The symposium expands the group exhibition New Tactics for Unseen Bodies and examines the highly topical relationship between body and image in our time. Our bodies are changed and perceived in a close exchange with the images of them and photography, as technology, undergoes extensive changes. The artists and curator behind the exhibition as well as associate professor and creativity researcher Jan Løhmann Stephensen will participate in the symposium. More participants will be announced later. The symposium is organised in a collaboration between Galleri Image, Art Week Aarhus, Aarhus University and Kunsthal Aarhus. Free admission.  

The exhibition is supported by The City of Aarhus, The Danish Arts Foundation, The Augustinus Foundation and The Grosserer L. F. Foght Foundation.

Photo credit: Alexandra Leykauf, Lyonel F, 2019

Front page website phot: Cropped version of Michelle Eistrup, Charging Change_ "Zaka Zaka", Barreiro Portugal, 2022