MUTATIONS III

Public Images - Private Views

A Project of the European Month of Photography
Berlin, Bratislava, Luxembourg, Moscow, Paris, Rome and Vienna

Opening: Thu, 28.10. 2010, 18.00
Duration: 29.10.2010 – 08.01.2011
Curators: Gunda Achleitner, Berthold Ecker

The third edition of the exhibition series MUTATIONS focuses on the interface between photography and the Internet. (Web) Artists, photographers, photojournalists, and theorists from all over Europe were invited to submit projects addressing questions of “private representations and public appearances.”

Photography had its heyday in the 1980s, with gigantic high-quality (high-gloss) prints. Today, by contrast, people hardly talk about “photography” as such—the interest is now in “images.” The latter, in turn, have long become a mass product: everyone is putting his or her personal photos online, and platforms such as Facebook or Twitter and blogs afford everyone else almost unlimited access to them.

In art, too, the use of everyday photographs and snapshots has become common practice; the significance of a photographic subject often depends not so much on its aesthetic relevance but rather on the network woven around it: by publishing “images”—of ourselves, of family and friends—and offering glimpses of our own “real,” or staged, lives as well as the lives of others, we build a network of participants who feel attracted by the subject matters our pictures bring up and add more images.

The plethora of private images available online has been transformed into a playground of experimentation in which we create new geographic, political, and social realities. The boundary separating “private” from “public” has long been abolished.  

Presented projects:
Simon Bauer: Ambivalent Ambiences
Hubert Blanz: public tracks
Anders Bojen & Kristoffer Ørum: Topographies of the Insignificant
Benjamin Cadon & Ewen Chardronnet: BANGALORE: Subjective Cartography
Michele Cera & Federico Covre: Italy: A visual archive / DocumentaryPlatform
Edmund Clark: Guantanamo: If the light goes out
Rob Hornstra & Arnold van Bruggen: The Sochi Project: On the other side of the mountains
Yveline Loiseur & Bureau l’Imprimante: La Vie matérielle / Material Life
Paula Muhr: Females under Tension
Susanne Wehr: personal-views  

More information about Eyes On - Month of Photography Vienna can be found on www.eyes-on.at and on the official website of MUTATIONS III.