RUTH HOMMELSHEIM, SERGIO ZEVALLOS | She turns round laughing
Opening: Friday, 17 October, 7 p.m.
Exhibition: 18 October - 15 November 2008
For their joint exhibition at the Loris Gallery, Ruth Hommelsheim and Sergio Zevallos have created process- and space-oriented photo installations that correspond in their dissimilarity in such a way as to allow the performative approach of both artists to appear as the key artistic moment.
The content of Ruth Hommelsheim’s new project picks up on her earlier work Bewahrungen from 2007. Taking family photographs, she examines the demeanour, expression and gestures of the photographed, removing them from the actual photographs and hence from their social context. Knocked out of their background, these figures acquire a performative character as soloists of their selves. Hommelheim takes this opportunity of having them re-enacted by the same individuals, now decades older. With gravity, wit and irony, they are then placed in relation to one another in a pictorial space. The focus of this interaction between release and re-enactment is once again on individuals and their posture. By eliminating the earlier context, duplicated singularity becomes a performative event, allowing for the emergence of new relational contexts beyond the confines of time. With impressive clarity, the dance of the figures begins.
Sergio Zevallos’s work is a constant organizing and disorganizing of images and their content. With photography and language as the medium, he begins investigating the surface of things and of bodies on the border between fiction and reality. In his current series, Zevallos stages emotional moments, presenting them in reduced form with a number of stills. He looks for rhythmic connections at the visual level and arranges them as steps in a dance sequence. Slight, almost imperceptible movements and facial expressions are repeated, albeit with subtle changes, only to be interrupted by sudden exaggerated gestures. While a number of images acquire an almost iconic character as a result of focused moments, others dissolve in abstract and surreal vestiges of movement. What the protagonists in fact represent remains unstable. The distorted gestures – which exist merely as technical repetition – are constantly on the brink of caricature. Sergio Zevallos’s image sequences are micro-dramas that demonstrate emotional chaos at the moment of illogicality.
The photo installations of Hommelsheim and Zevallos unify the moment of movement with choreographies that sound out the limits of the figures involved.
The exhibition takes place within the framework of the European Photography Month Berlin.
*Sergio Zevallos’s photographic series is based on video material from the FICTIVE DAYS project. Cooperation partners: Wooloo production - NEW LIFE BERLIN Contemporary Art Festival and TEMPS – space support for nomadic projects. Performance and camera: Amelia Geocos, Nikki Johnson, Prescott Trudeau, Rebecca Loyche, Shokufeh Kavani, Tomomi Shimizu,Ve Magni und Sergio Zevallos.
