Exhibitions at the FotoMuseum Antwerp

Theatres of the Real: Contemporary British Photography

There is currently a really interesting show on at the Fotomuseum in Antwerp, showcasing the recent work of 8 british photographers; what connects all of them is a sense of the theatrical in relation to the photographic image. Although all of the photographers are concerned with contemporary sociocultural issues (in specifically British culture) they each take a unique approach towards their subject matter, redefining what it is to document a historical moment photographically.

My personal favourite series would have to be Mitra Tabrizian's work, a series which show familiar scenes with hints of the ominous, converting the photographed environment into a crime scene through the inclusion of simple textual and compositional elements that suggest a darker undertone.

Sarah Dobai


Emily (Corridor), Yellow Corridor, 2008

Born in 1965. Lives and works in London. There were about 3 diptychs of Dobai's on show in the exhibition- she had coupled scenes with a human figure with architectural shots made up of a comparable composition. On Galerie Zurcher's profile of the photographer, it says describes the photographs as follows:

'The shop windows are perceived in their double reality, as "display" zones where a "theatre of consumption" is played out, and as transparent glass plates that the eye traverses, or on which it captures the kind of "reflection" that Walter Benjamin associated with cinematographic effects. The models are photographed in settings that make up a universe in parallel to that of the shopping centres. As in Robert Bresson’s films, these actor-models are shorn of personal characteristics, their poses suggesting the brevity of their passage.'

Annabel Elgar


The Rehearsal, 2007

Joanna Lowry, 'An Imaginary Place' from Theatres of the Real
Photoworks/FotoMuseum Antwerp

The work of Annabel Elgar inhabits a more elaborate and gothic world of storytelling. Narrative here is not something that has been pared away but something that has been embellished and layered. The stories that lie behind these pictures are ones that extend back into a dark folk memory. Elements of legend, fairy tale and historical anecdote jostle with hack journalism, urban myth and B-movie storylines. The scenarios that emerge from this process of allegorical bricolage are ones that we instinctively recognize because, baroque though they might be, we encounter them every day in our newspapers and televisions and at night-time we visit them again in our dreams.

Annabel Elgar's sources are more mythic than literary or art historical, but they also operate through the sense of a shared set of scripts. Her carefully designed sets are sets for plays that will never be fully dramatised and whose full story will never be known: the actors may never appear within the frame- and if they do they will probably be looking the other way, their faces invariably hidden. The props have been carefully chosen to produce an endless proliferation of narrative choices, artfully posed between the fairytale and the everyday. The key characters in her half-told stories inhabit houses that we faintly recognise but they are clearly deranged and obsessive, dressing up in strange costumes, waiting for parties that will never happen, tying themselves up in the curtains, playing with ventriloquists' dummies, or setting the garden shed alight.

Elgar inserts a bleak Orwellian vision of sad bedsits, neglected kitchens and subterranean basements into a folkloric scenery of suspiciously lush green fields, tangled gardens and dark forests. If the uncanny is characterised by a sense of the unfamiliar suddenly revealing itself within the familiar, then it is surely Elgar's photographs that most effectively work at binding these two senses together. In her case she uses the conventions of staged photography to knit them together materially, arranging the objects in her pictures into enigmatic compositions that resist any clear resolution.

The stories that Elgar relates to us are cross-cut by familiar themes: madness and sadness and badness all have their role to play in these scenarios. In these stories the struggles between the rich and the poor are relentless and eternal, the home is a place of poverty and ruin, the family a potential site of treachery and despair.

Tom Hunter


Living in Hell

Tom Hunter graduated from the London College of Printing with a BA First Class Honours [1994], Hunter took his MA at the Royal College of Art, London [1997]. In 1998, Hunter won the John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award. In 2006 Hunter was the first artist to have a photography show at the National Gallery, London.

Hunter currently lives and works in London. His work is often particular, but not exclusive, to the community of travellers he knows as neighbours and friends in East London. He has exhibited work both nationally and internationally, in solo and group shows and is also a Senior Research Fellow of the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. source

Sarah Pickering


White Goods, 2007

Sarah Pickering's startling and somehow dreamy images of explosions have been featured in magazines such as Art Review, Art Monthly and The New York Sun. Sarah states, "My work explores the idea of imagined threat and response, and looks at fear and planning for the unexpected, merging fact and fiction, fantasy and reality. The images are a representation of society's coping mechanisms, which are often happening out of the public arena."

"My previous body of work, Public Order documented the ambiguous urban landscape of the UK's Metropolitan Police Public Order Training Centre, an unreal constructed world of civic intransigence and imagined threat. The Explosions series further develops this investigation into the crux of reality and its simulation."

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Nigel Shafran

Joanna Lowry - An imaginary space [Theatres of the Real]
Shafran’s domestic photographs, taken amidst the more benign clutter of his own home, also test the autonomy of the object. In these photographs – photographs that situate themselves more firmly in an observational mode, based upon spaces that are known and loved – objects seem to compose themselves into gentle still-lives, assuming an independent life that the photographer happens upon by chance. He photographs the odd collections of things that accumulate in his Dad’s office, flowers on a table , the washed up dishes by kitchen sink. Yet these objects also share in the strangeness of the prop table, they are, after all the things that prop up the photographer’s life.

Clare Strand

Gone Astray Portraits borrows from the 19th century street portrait convention of using painted murals as backgrounds to photograph city dwellers. Each sitter is carefully styled and propped to assume an urban generic type, on close examination each subject shows signs of wear, from ripped tights to bandaged wrists. The title of the series is taken from a Charles Dickens text, Gone Astray 1853 which is an account of a young child lost in the City of London. A story filled of references to anxiety and vulnerability and to people leading double lives. source

Mitra Tabrizian


White Nights

The Way We Live Now, Stuart Hall

An appreciation of what is radically novel and innovative in Mitra Tabrizian’s most recent work must begin with on understanding of what her previous work had already accomplished: for the latter provides the creative platform on which the new work stands. Powered by her deep involvement in the debates in the 80’s and 90’s around subjectivity and ideology, psychoanalysis and feminism, gender, race and sexuality, and deeply informed by the explorations in photographic practice and the image which her earlier projects represented, Mitra Tabrizian’s has now vigorously mobilized and resumed all the ‘lessons’ of that whole body of work in order to address radically new subject-matter and to attempt a challenging project– a critique of the everyday life of contemporary corporate-post-modernity and its ‘systems’ of representation.

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Danny Treacy


Them 2. 2002

By definition the monster is incapable of reproduction: to do so would be to abandon deviation through the continuation of a genus, or genre. Invoking the law of the monster in his series Them, wherein a body is understood, but one which does not obey the rules, Treacy has nevertheless, managed to offer Them an equally deviant offspring. His most recent series, Those, is a series of what the artist calls protuberances, the parts of the body which stick out or intrude into space. Treacy's photographs stem from his own body parts- nose, penis, belly, knee, elbow, fingers. Although they appear suspended in space, a ground is indicated by the way they recede slightly into blackness. They transgress genre, emerging as part human, part object, part animal.

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