For
Art Dubai 2017 East Wing will present two projects that play with ideas of fiction and reality, taking on subjects ranging from science fiction to monumental moments in history.
Cédric Delsaux’s 'Dark Lens' and the Swiss artistic duo,
Cortis & Sonderegger’s series, 'Icons' both use forms of fiction to manufacture surreal worlds that have one foot in firmly planted in a concrete reality.
Art Dubai is an international art fair with its roots in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. Known as a particularly global and innovative fair, Art Dubai features three gallery programmes offering audiences the opportunity to discover the work of more than 500 artists through histories and across geographies.
East Wing will be located in the Contemporary Gallery section, booth B-12 where we premiere 2 unique light boxes by French artist,
Cédric Delsaux from his futuristic series,
'Dark Lens'. An unsettling confluence of hyper-real cityscapes and a post-postmodern sense of humour the series gives audiences an otherworldly vision of contemporary cities, specifically Dubai.
These two state of the art unique light boxes give a new interpretation to this series of fantastical landscapes.
“My first intention wasn’t to produce a series on ‘Star Wars,’ but to photograph locations that are the makeup of our modernity: parking lots, peripheral zones, wastelands forgotten places, of both beauty and ugliness, common and mad…Nevertheless, something was missing, my images were flat, déjà vu. I then had the idea to add these sci-fi characters, with the immediate effect of making my primal sensations stand out, the fantastical nature of the characters invading the whole frame, both universes harmoniously coming together.”
Expressing reality through fiction is an ongoing theme in Delsaux’s work from inviting subjects to stand on a simple platform and become their own character (Scale 1:1), to recreating a fictional tale of the past (1784) like a maze with no beginning and no end, or in his most recent work where he recreates a reality based on the infamous story of murderer Jean-Claude Romand (Zone de Repli) striving to capture a landscape of betrayal, revealing the vision of a wayward society.
Jojakim Cortis & Adrian Sonderegger began working collaboratively while studying at Zurich University of the Arts in 2005. Collectively they conceive and manufacture surreal worlds in their series
Icons, focusing on monumental moments in history, while questioning the temporal nature of experience and memory.
Carefully considering the conditions in which each original image was made, the artists meticulously mimic these same methods in their studio; using scale models, paying close attention to the original lighting and vantage point of the camera in an attempt to literally ‘re-make’ these events, which range from the crash of the Hindenburg and the supersonic passenger jet, Concorde, to the last photograph of the Titanic and the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima. Cortis & Sonderegger expanded this self-imposed challenge to include important moments in the history of photography; remaking images by Henri Cartier Bresson, William Eggleston, Man Ray, Ansel Adams and Andreas Gursky.
In their final compositions they step back to reveal their studio and working methods exposing the ‘backstage’ of their craft. By including the debris of their constructions (paint, glue, cotton wool, etc.), the artists create a frame - an image within an image - positioning the viewer in an unbalanced reality between the original memorized photographs from the past and the remake, combined with the artist’s studio environment in the present. The inner image acts as historical record, while the outer background becomes a snapshot of the present.
Their aim is not to mislead the viewer – instead, they want to fully expose this staging process in order to raise questions about the temporal nature of experience and memory. The relationship between chance and photography is also in question. How does one contemplate reenactments of a one in a million ‘chance moment’ when it is transformed meticulously into a staged reproduction, leaving nothing to chance?
