ART CITIES:Milan-Broomberg & Chanarin
Broomberg & Chanarin approach photography as a form of conceptual ethnography. Much of their work has been concerned with the gathering of visual data relating to matters of human behaviour, often in places of political tension. Stylistically, they avoid the overtly creative, opting instead for a pared down, formal approach bordering on neutrality. They have no signature style. For them the world is a set of highly coded surfaces or stages of action. The camera is used to isolate these things, to cut them out for interpretation and reflection.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lisson Gallery Archive
In Broomberg & Chanarin’s solo exhibition “Trace Evidence” at Lisson Gallery in Millan, the duo presents a wide overview of his work through eight different photographic series from 2006 to 2016, and a new work created especially for the exhibition. The artists use photography as a form of conceptual ethnography, immersing themselves into spaces and situations that reveal evidence, residue or traces of past human presence. With abstracted imagery deliberately lacking a central subject or focal point, their refusal to depict or narrativise has become one of their primary tools for communicating the ineffable in war and conflict. The exhibition title draws directly from “Every Piece Of dust On Freud’s Couch” (2015) commissioned by the Freud Museum in London, in which they hired a police forensic team to scrutinise Sigmund Freud’s iconic couch, gathering DNA samples, strands of hair and a multitude of dust particles left by his home’s many visitors from the rug covering Freud’s couch. These findings were transformed into a large woven tapestry, mirroring the scale and texture of the original, as well as a number of high-resolution radiographic quartz images, all collated under the rubric of Trace Evidence. In June 2008 they travelled to Afghanistan to be embedded with British Army units on the front line in Helmand Province. Along with their cameras, they took a roll of photographic paper, contained in a simple lightproof cardboard box. Rather than photographing the landscape or soldiers in combat, Broomberg & Chanarin unrolled a six-meter section of the paper and exposed it to the sun for 20 seconds. The results seen here deny the viewer the cathartic effect offered up by the conventional language of photographic responses to conflict and suffering with titles like: “The Day Nobody Died” or “Repatriation” (both 2008), “Portable Monuments” (2012) continues the artists’ preoccupation with Brecht’s 1955 publication “War Primer”. Using a series of coloured blocks as a lexicon, Broomberg & Chanarin have developed a code that has become a methodology for interrogating and deconstructing photographic press images. “American Landscapes” (2009), takes the interiors of commercial photography studios across the United States as its ostensible subject. The artists reject the foreground and highlight instead the space in which images are literally “made”. In these occasionally abstract photographs the surfaces of walls, floors and ceilings junction along straight lines and parabolic curves to create the unspoiled white space known in the photography industry as Cycloramas. Physical restriction and personal expression are more closely observed in “Red House” (2006), Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin have photographed marks and drawings made on the walls of a fading pink building now known as the Red House. Situated on the slope of a hill in the town of Sulaymaniyah in Kurdish northern Iraq, it was originally the headquarters of Saddam’s Ba’athist party. It was also a place of incarceration, torture and often death for many of the oppressed Kurds for whom the cell walls were the most immediate outlet for expression.
Info: Lisson Gallery, Via Zenale 3, Milan, Duration 20/1-17/3/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.lissongallery.com
