Studio for Propositional Cinema at Museum Abteiberg
Since its inauguration in 2013, Studio for Propositional Cinema had produced work that could be described as paracinematic or paraphotographic—participating with the fabric constraints and prospects of each mediums with out essentially taking {a photograph} or making a movie. For that reason, the collective’s present solo exhibition at Museum Abteiberg, “The Digicam of Catastrophe,” presents an instantaneous shock to the viewer: a sequence of sensuous, large-format black-and-white images following three characters by way of post-apocalyptic land- and cityscapes.
Opposite to facile appeals to its representational energy, informational accessibility, and democratic circulation, the collective views pictures as an extractive expertise of the economic age: a damaging artwork that sees the world as a uncooked materials on which the forces of manufacturing can act. It steadily turns into clear, in actual fact, that the catastrophe of the exhibition’s title refers back to the invention of pictures as a lot because it does to the medium’s extinction. If the {photograph} is a product of an more and more catastrophic modernity, how, if in any respect, can we plan for its future?
Hanging in mirrored frames on silver partitions, every {photograph} within the exhibition options textual content printed straight on the glazing. They inform the story of a band of photographic rebels resisting the homogeneity of spectacular tradition by conserving a type of analogue image-making alive after one thing like the top of the world, right here introduced as the top of the picture. “We will retain the opportunity of making our personal pictures,” writes the Studio, “by regaining management of the equipment of image-making, conserving manufacturing recipes and information open-source and obtainable, and constructing and sustaining networks for his or her distribution, like how illicit information was retained and handed alongside within the so-called Darkish Ages.” Intriguing vitrines crammed with proof of historic photographic processes—together with a digital camera and numerous minerals and chemical compounds—supply each proof of the medium’s previous and a self-professed survival information.
Participating within the violence of pictures and concurrently encouraging others to reclaim the method for themselves, the Studio dares to theorize the situation of all image-making at our current historic juncture. It’s one thing near: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
