Members of the Kamnik photo club Blaž Janežič, Dušan Letnar, Simon Podgoršek, Jana Nakrst, Robert Novak, Rudi Kotnik (in collaboration with Zvonka Simčič) and Aleš Senožetnik are participating in the international photography biennial of contemporary photography, Photonic Moments, with the exhibition Two Places under the mentorship of Peter Rauch. organized by the Center for Contemporary Photography - Photon Gallery!
The opening of the exhibition will take place on Wednesday, June 11 at 8 p.m. in the Kamnik Cultural Center Gallery.
We brought to the club's collective space everything that interests us at the moment and that we think would be suitable for joint consideration. The first question that arises turns out to be crucial: what is the common denominator? What will we use to cut into the presented meat? And the answer is not some designation of the title of the workshop or the topic of the project.
The problem is the consequences, what we will lose with the naming and how the title will guide the decisions, got behind you and haunts you like a nagging topic. With this aim in mind, I got involved in collective work, I carried out exercises that I regularly set for us and at the same time pushed from within the final definition of the common denominator - the title of the project. By delaying the naming of the common in the community, I myself took the place of the denominator, which was clearly shown when someone brought a selection of created photos for review, inserted a USB key into the computer and opened a list of folders. Among them I saw one called by my last name. How did my folder end up on his key, what of mine does his memory possess? How many such folders exist on their drives? I don't own any of them and I'm signed to all of them at the same time. The common denominator was established already at the beginning of our gatherings, with the agreement that we will implement a project during the year, that I will lead it and direct their work. I enter into this agreement without definition, with the decision that the object of the collective work should emerge through the process, that the theme should be articulated through performance. It is this retroactivity — let the concept come at the end — that is the key theme that I try to convey all the time: let's work backwards, describe the obvious, and in this description try to highlight what remains, the superfluous part that appears as if it were already there all along. here, he just appeared now. In retrospect, the difference between articulation and representation, between what is said and what is seen, can be shown. The purpose of the work is therefore the articulation of the work and the recognition of what remains unarticulated in the articulation. The title comes at the end, the object of the creation develops through the creation itself, usually as something that we did not even plan, but by creating, we gave the possibility for it to "appear".
Two Places is a project about spaces of interest – about places where we find ourselves, about places we escape to, or about places we find ourselves when we escape. It turns out that we are interested in certain places in the world where we can take pictures, but we are also interested in the places in the world that we create by taking pictures. In any case, it turns out that the place where we find ourselves is not one, but two. Through photography, we confronted two places, two extremes, an opposition that is established through a relationship and reduction to a common denominator: we got two places of one, two extremes of the same thing. Everyone revolved around their denominator, exploring its dimensions, limits, and everything that lies just beyond that which is limited. The range of places and extremes is extremely varied: on the one hand, the social space of the Bistrice basin, nearby forests, night walks through Kamnik, on the other hand, cellars and spaces on the way, constructs of macro shots and the discrepancy between the created exteriors and the advertised interiors of Duplice, or the tension of two unfathomable media, sound and image. The collective product is the two places of our cooperation - the first were meetings, the second is the one that is exhibited. We can look at them separately, but even in such a case we produce another, absent in a completely arbitrary form.
Text: Peter Rauch
The exhibition will be on display until June 30, 2014.
