| |
| 28th September
/ 10th November 2007 |
 |
"Regarding the Horror
/ Ante el horror"
caraballo - farman |
| |
“Being a
spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a
quintessential modern experience,” noted Susan Sontag
in her book Regarding the Pain of Others.
That is the theme developed in the new work of the artist team
caraballo-farman. Titled ‘Regarding the Horror’
in homage to Sontag’s thoughtfulness, they distinguish
horror from other reactions such as pain, mourning and grief.
The theorist Stanley Cavell calls horror “the perception
of the precariousness of human identity… the perception
that it may be lost or invaded.” “Horror is the
total loss of practical and mental control,” writes Talal
Asad, “…to feel helpless in the face of a sudden
attack against everyday life and, above all, the loss of that
ordinariness in which human identity resides…”
These images are not posed or staged. The original images were
collected over a period of three years from news sources. At
first, it was a daily unconscious ritual for the artist team,
a way, they say, that they themselves reacted to events and
to news of events which seemed to be overtaking everyone, especially
in the US where they live most of the time. The work came later:
heavily manipulating the images, resizing, relighting and re-‘painting’
in Photoshop; isolating individual figures, focusing in on the
face as a reflection of the event, and finally printing them
on canvas.
A reaction to formlessness, to the sudden realization of the
absolute frailty of human shape and identity, Horror is the
unspeakable, the unrhetoricized, the prior reaction. The expressions,
the prominence of the hands, the explosion in the face, the
wordless cries in these photos emphasize that the original event
exceeds the capacity of language to articulate or purge the
horror.
caraballo-farman is a two-person team working
in video, installation and photography. Their work has been
shown around the world at galleries, museums, festivals and
biennials including The Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador), Berlinale
(Germany), World Wide Video Festival and Impakt (Netherlands),the
Banff Center for the Arts (Canada), Buenos Aires International
Art Biennial (Argentina), Artists Space, Whitney ISP and PS1
(US).
>
Download PDF |
|
|
|
|
