Re:PRESENT presents the installation WHAT IS (NOT) THERE? STORIES OF AFTERMATH FROM COLOMBIA AND MOZAMBIQUE by Columbian-born photographer and anthropologist JUAN ORRANTIA.
Opening: April 19th, 6pm to 9pm
Exhibition: April 20th – May 18th
Galerie der Kunststiftung Poll, Berlin
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Juan Orrantia’s body of work forms a critical documentary practice concerning questions around the relationship of time, memory, violence, (dis)location and imagination, in those parts of the world where temporalities have been disrupted. Through evocative photography and multimedia installation, and drawing on ethnography, the filmic essay and captured soundscapes, Orrantia’s projects explore different aspects of postwar/terror experiences. The works displayed in this exhibition have all been produced in Colombia and Mozambique between 2007 and 2011. Normalcy (2009) uses still photography, sound and video as a way of documenting the intimate spaces and moments of life in a town in the Colombian Caribbean where paramilitaries massacred more than 30 men in 2000. Residues (2010), is a portrait of lives in the receding shadow of war in Mozambique, through landscapes of apparent desolation to urban structures that have been reoccupied at different moments. Entrada Prohibida (2011) is a photographic meditation, a reflection on working ports, particularly in the global south, where life is filled with the frictions born from the ongoing encounter of old structures of inequality and new desires.
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Juan Orrantia is a Colombian photographer and anthropologist, working in the documentary arts and the possibilities of photography as narrations of social realities in places like Colombia, Mozambique, India and the US. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from Yale University and has just finished a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Wits School of Arts, University of the Witswatersrand in South Africa. He was recently awarded the Tierney Foundation Fellowship for photography.
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This exhibition is accompanied by an artist talk, round table discussion and workshop:
Monday, April 22, 2013 // Q&A Round Table discussion, 6pm with Juan Orrantia, Christopher Pinney and Mark Curran
All events take place at the at the Galerie der Kunststiftung Poll // Gipsstraße 3, 10119 Berlin // Thursday to Saturday, 2pm to 7pm.
Christopher Pinney is an anthropologist and art historian. He is currently Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London. From 2007-09 he was Visiting Crowe Professor in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. His research interests cover the art and visual culture of South Asia, with a particular focus on the history of photography and chromolithography in India. He has also worked on industrial labor and Dalit goddess possession. His most recent book is Photography and Anthropology from Reaktion Books – Exposure Series, 2012.
Mark Curran lives and works in Berlin and Dublin. He holds a practice-led PhD through the Dublin Institute of Technology (2011) and lectures in the BA Photography programme, Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin and is Visiting Professor on the MA in Visual and Media Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin. Incorporating multi-media installation informed by ethnographic understandings, Curran’s has undertaken a cycle of projects addressing the predatory context of migrations of global capital. These have been extensively presented and published. Further information at Lockout 2013.
In collaboration with the Freie Universität Visual and Media Anthropology Program in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Re: will be holding a one-week lecture and workshop series for MA Students with Juan Orrantia, Christopher Pinney and Yulia Mahr.
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Re: is dedicated to film and photography positioned beyond the western mainstream through projects and exhibitions that actively promote indigenous, social, ethnographic and experimental photography and film, vernacular media work and ‘minority’ cinema and media-related publications. With particular stress on non-European work, or work from within Europe that challenges established media discourses, Re: supports investigations into alternative and hybrid-form filmmaking, dialogical and interdisciplinary projects, self-representational strategies and re-engagement with historical archives.
Through exhibitions, events, productions and publications, Re: offers an open forum for dialogue on the role images play in our culture, on reflexive critical practice and on methodologies challenging conventional ways of seeing and perceiving.
Committed to an interdisciplinary academic dialogue, Re: organises workshops, seminars and exchanges. We are equally engaged with the local community through educational workshops and creative projects.
Uniquely, Re: is dedicated to a transparent and reflexive curatorial process by integrating the progress and editorial procedures of our projects into offline and online discussions.
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Further details on
→ www.re-projects.org
Image © Juan Orrantia, 2009
