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Elsa Gregersdotter Yushi Li Joshua Tarplin Yuxin Jiang Anka Gregorczyk Curator: Zohreh Deldadeh
Narratives around the Other Body
Elsa Gregersdotter Untitled from I Look at this Tree and Think of Myself series, 2019
Some-Bodies
Narratives around the Other Body
The distinction between the self and the other has always been created through a body and its apparently differentiating peculiarities. The body, notwithstanding the fact that it carries such differentiations, can at the same time tie the self to the other. Because of the perception we possess on the environment within which we live, and precisely due to the ties between such surroundings and the body, the ruptures between the two can increase or even decrease, while at the same time connections or ties between them can deepen or loosen. Therefore, from this perspective, what has actively played a role in the actualization of hierarchies between the humanbeing and its surrounding environment would not simply become an ineffective entity in making distinctions between the self and the other. Encountering this cycle of othering, hence, is based on knowing the self and the other. As the closest entity to us, the body would therefore play a mediating role in such transformations. Some-Bodies; Narratives around the Other Body is an invitation to pay close attention to the ties that connect the body to the other, whether the other is a part of our-selves or what has been projected as the other within sociopolitical hierarchies. Body has always been an extremely contentious subject in different societies. Controlling bodies, setting restrictions upon them, adjusting the bodies and even in some cases eliminating specific bodies are amongst the most immanent instruments of controlling bodies by institutions of power. Othering through bodies and different qualities ascribed to them is one of such control mechanisms. This makes bodies the center of the prevailing hierarchical dichotomies. The male/female dichotomy is aimed to categorize bodies based on gender. Other dichotomies, such as old/young, able/disabled, fat/thin and the like, are also constituted based on one’s body. Alongside with body’s differentiating feathers, bodily qualities constitute one’s identity. From this point of view, a body can be situated somewhere between being oneself and becoming an-other. It seems, though, the boundaries between being and becoming remain ambiguous and undiscovered. The meanings of self and other, thus, change according to the direction we desire to turn to. As Julia Kristeva argues aptly, living with others requires recognizing our uncanny strangeness. Some-Bodies; Narratives around the Other Body is an exhibition aimed to point out such strange and desuetude aspects of the body through the work of five artists in order to lay out the struggle over the self and the other through discovery and understanding of the world around bodies. By putting their own selves and their relations with others and the world around in the center of their artworks, the artists in this exhibition have tried to explore and discover some of the most immanent points of connections and distinctions between the self and the other. However, they neither were merely focused on the body, nor do they necessarily aim to stress the proximities and distances between bodies. In the meantime, their definitions of the others are not in accord with the definition of the other constituted by different social systems. But, in practice, it was my own attempt to understand what role the body played in their artworks. Exchanges between the self, the other and the body, therefore, became the main subject matter of my study in this curatorial project.
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The discovery in Elsa Gregersdotter’s work begins with her family and parents. Starting from the far past from before her birth, what we observe is that she took us on a journey through her father’s photo archive to the world today via her own camera, when the roles have transformed to such an extent that we see her as a parent, creating her own world. In Yushi Li’s works, we are about to get close to the realm of her private relationships, where we see her observing male bodies within an inter-gendered back and forth game. In Joshua Tarplin’s collection, the circle of personal relations with others and the surrounding world has been expanded to the extent that it encompassed his friends and other relatives. We can see much more mobility or fluidity in his work regarding the selfother relations, while at the same time we see how the body plays a central role in his photographs as a common language or vehicle to establish communications and relations amongst different individuals. In Yuxin Jiang’s works, however, a more direct look at the other can be found. She is focused on the other through nationality and social identity. Here, the very othering perspective of the West about the East is being challenged in an ironic way. Bodies, in her two collections, play expressive roles for both sides, and much of what constitutes both sides’ reading is being manifested through the language, body and body-language. And finally, in Anka Gregorczyk’s works, we move beyond all previous definitions to look at the physical transformations of human bodies outside our planet, where gravity no longer affects them. What we observe here is what we might experience in reality in near future. Her works make us think of how our present is going to alter in such a different – or other – future. Although the initial idea of this exhibition was born a long time ago, reflecting on the self, the other and the body within the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and the ongoing global protests against racism can bring new insights to this field.
Zohreh Deldadeh Exhibition curator
Zohreh Deldadeh is a freelance art researcher and curator based in Tehran. She holds a BA in Graphic Design and an MA in Art Research. Her curatorial practice mainly investigates how socio-political issues shape the visual culture of specific societies. Since last year she has been focused on body and its socio-political aspects.
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What Can a Body Do?
(Art)iculations and (Reflect)ions on the Liminality of Self and Other M Sarvi Zargar
"To have a body is already to be folded into the things rather than to stand at a distance from them." Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics (2005: 53)
I A fully known, perfectly (re)presented, and politically free body does not exist except within the realms of ideology and propaganda. No definition, in the meantime, can fully answer the question of what a body is, since excess is always present in each and every body; either attached to or detached from it. Thinking about a body, thus, is a constant move beyond the new realms of un-translatable, un-thinkable, and un-decidable. III
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A body, argue Deleuze and Guattari, is the outside of thought. Questioning a body is not aimed to ask what a body is but, instead, to ask what a body is capable of doing. Two bodies, accordingly, ultimately end up either with a border conflict on their edges or an affective intimacy in the thresholds. In both cases, bodies inter(act) and ex(change); hence, trans(form). Therefore, bodies are linked to actions and changes. Reflections on bodies, thus, are articulations on the why-ness and how-ness of the doings of a body: interactions, exchanges, and transformations. Here, all these qualities can be encapsulated in two overarching themes: potentialities and multiplicities of a body. It is within this context that Yushi Li’s work moves beyond the Anthropocene-oriented perception of the relations between the self and the other. By de-forming the latter into a rabbit or an octopus, the artist puts emphasis on what a body can do: love, desire, dream, and fantasize while it frees itself from the other’s desire to oppose or even defuse the imposed presupposed categorizations of how to love, how to desire, how to dream, and finally how to fantasize. IIII
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Beside potentialities and multiplicities, a body is a skinned space. The skin is an interface between the self and the other: a grey area of affection and effects. At the same time, it is an open-ended space which goes beyond its limits. Not only does a body see, touch, smell, taste, and hear, but it is also (direct)ed to the other. In Elsa Gregersdotter’s photos, skins are where bodies expand; prolonging to give testimony to the otherness of a set of united bodies right exactly when they stop being familiar bodies: when they pose to the photographer. Bodies, therefore, connect while they remain singular. From a singular body arises a total, universal body. The link between the two, here, is actualized through remembering, i.e. re-constituting belonging, while longing for a collective identity. A universal body, therefore, embodies all singular bodies across identities, whether personal, national, or any other. The outcome, right opposite to the naive notion of Gestalt as it has been discussed repetitiously in psychology, becomes a montage; fractured, boundless, shattered, in bits and pieces, folded with (in) and while unfolding with(out), bent and expanded bodies; all together, they are not aimed to bring the self to meet the other, but make a single body an indissoluble part of the plural body through the principle of recognition. How come that one’s closest individuals become the other? Without recognition, what kind of life we are supposed to live? 11
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Categories of formal and informal bodies have mainly been translated politically to the citizens vs. non-citizens. It is within such a divided framework of thoughts on bodies that boundaries emerge between, first, the self and the other, and secondly between different levels of citizenship, i.e. citizen’s bodies and non-citizen others’ excluded bodies. A non-citizen possesses a marginalized body that has become the main site of domination through complex forms of exclusion and suspension. It is exactly on the border of formality and informality, i.e. on the edge of marginalization and suspension, that a body folds, or bends towards the inside from the outside, brings the outsider inside and makes the inside visible to an outsider. Through becoming a marginalized (dis)member of a with(in) space from with(out), the side-lined body of the other negatively constitutes the (un)ethical domain of the self: a superior citizen. In this line of argumentation, all bodies become political. There is no apolitical body. V Between bodies, there exists the third space, the term itself being a borrowing from Homi Bhabha. The third space is a dialogic site for annunciation, identification, negotiation, and recognition. When bodies come together, they (juxta)pose. Forces, coming out of bodies, engage with one another. The result is a new form of inter(section)ality of forces; the forces that are nothing but an act of taking the risk of recognizing the other’s desires. It is exactly within the third space, one could argue, that Joshua Tarplin constitutes his A Stress-Free Point of View. Within such an immanent space, built up for the recognition of the other, a potentiality becomes actual intrinsically right in the borderline of the self and the other; on the threshold of being and becoming, within the liminality between irreducible bodies and banal totalities based on nationality, flag, race, gender, dialect, and the like. Such liminalities reveal not only the foreignness of the other’s body, but also the estrangement of one’s own body. Similarity and alterity, therefore, come together in the very momentum of liminality in A Stress-Free point of view. V VI
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To recognize the other is not to merely recognize the rights, dignities, formalities, but also to recognize positions and voices that are already untranslatable and unreadable. It is, paradoxically, from such untranslatability or unreadability of the positions that translations and readings become possible. When the bodies of the self and the other encounter, it is within the impossibility of unity that affection becomes possible. In Yushi Li’s collection, accordingly, the artist is aimed to deconstruct what is being inscribed onto a body through an unreadable gaze. The project deconstructs Lura Mulvey’s theory of a male gaze, according to which, fe(male)ness and (wo)manhood have been constituted through a male gaze perspective. Through changing the angle, the artist radicalizes the established notions of a gendered body and gaze. Performed by a male subject/object, gazed at by an invisible artist, and observed by a gender-nameless audience, the artist puts her viewers in an unsettling position of constant retreatment of identities, positions, and indeed gazes. How can we, then, understand scopophilia or voyeurism, when a gender-nameless gaze is looking at some(body)? Isn’t it that without recognition of an internal alterity one can indeed not be able to connect with the other? Not only does Li deconstruct the gaze, the gendered body, and the spectacle, but she also fundamentally deconstructs her own self. V VII
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Liminality emerges from the sea of immanent potentialities, inherent in all bodies. Thus, any imposed, transcendental imperative presupposition aimed to categorize the rationale behind the inter(connect) edness of bodies must be deconstructed in order to make room for the emerging potentialities. In Yuxin Jiang’s Instagram-based work, inherent sniffy mockery is being deconstructed in order to trans12
late the inherent othering in photos into an irony. Science, meanwhile, is deployed successfully to mediate here for not making another disdainful result: reversed orientalism. Ultimately, the project is aimed to bring sympathy amongst viewers and subjects as a way of actualizing potentialities amongst the existing bodies. V VIII
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In today’s surveillance-dominated world (dis)order, security is the main threat for the potentialities of our bodies. In other words, imposed and reinforced by the state apparatuses on bodies, security discourses disconnect connections amongst our bodies, be it short-circuits of contingencies or organized togetherness. Security, in its disciplinary and punitive totality, is targeted towards our bodies not just through pieces of machinery or even torture mechanisms, but also through surveillance apparatuses that have turned to be the main regulatory paradigm of the post 9/11 era. Aimed to turn collective bodies into detached apolitical entities, the security-based paradigm of our time smashed our collective bodies through its othering mechanisms. Promises driven out of terms such as globalization, bringing people together, global village and the age of full connectedness via social media, followed by the nightmare of ultra-nationalism, growing xenophobia, much more highlighted borderlines between the existing nation-states and the formation of new homelessness out of proxy-wars. How could we restore our collective bodies? What forms of newly invented connections and inter-connections do we need to form and re-form? How can a body activate its potentialities anew? What are the names of new forms of solidarities in the age of the Covid-19, upcoming possible pandemics, proxy-wars, deep othering processes, and smashed bodies? Without gravity, Anka Gregorczyk argues in her statement, our bodies would not be human anymore. She takes gravity here literally to reflect and speculate on the limitations of one’s body and mind. However, we can take the notion of gravity metaphorically to argue that we need to re-activate new gravities to fold into bodies around us, not to stand at a distance from them. Gravity, in this sense, entails potentiality; that needs to be discovered again and again. IX In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin argues that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. Then he reflects on the united us between which and our bodies we can make analogies. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us, contends Benjamin, exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women [and men] who could have given themselves to us. In other words, continues Benjamin, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. Similarly, the image of our happy bodies must be articulated and represented artistically in its inherent ties to the image of redemption; that, according to Benjamin, is necessarily collective. No single body can claim its sole happiness unless it has already been recognized by another body, while it at the same time recognizes the other. As a materialistic approach to re-invent the self and the other potentialities through the medium of the body, this is what we need to pursue in our troubling age: a new politics of hope.
References: Benjamin, Walter (1968). Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Harry Zohn (trans.), Schochen Books. Bhabha, Homi (1994). The Location of Culture, Routledge Publications. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1987). AÂ Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Brian Massumi (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harman, Graham (2005). Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Thing, Open Court Publications. Mulvey L. (1989). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In: Visual and Other Pleasures. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan.
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Some-Bodies
Narratives around the Other Body
Elsa Gregersdotter (Sweden, 1992) is an artist based in Stockholm. She graduated from the Valand Academy in Gothenburg with a BFA in Photography. She works inbetween the documentary photography and staged. In her works, she strives to create an imagery that tells us something about being human. Gregersdotter questions the line between reality and fiction and how we look at ourselves and others, in relation to the self.
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I Look at this Tree and Think of Myself, 2019
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glue it
Family After Dinner, 1996
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I Look at this Tree and Think of Myself “I look at the dolphins on my grandparent’s shelf and I think that this is the closest I can get” This series is an exploration of what happens when I turn my eyes to my family members. In the photographic moment, they become others. They stop being my family members and instead become characters in the costumes and positions I give them. The work is a story without narrative about the closest people in my life. A mix of everything. Truth, memories, lies, play and the absurdity of existence. With the help of my own photographs and the family archive, I want to explore what roles we play in front of each other and how we want to be seen.
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Mom and Dad and Me, 1992
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Mom and Dad and Me, 1992 ↗ Untitled, 1992 →
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Madonna and Child, 2019
A Gift from My Mother, 2019
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Mother, 2019
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Isak, 2019
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Spiderman, 2019
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Baby Brother in Bed, 2019
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Grandparents, 2019
Mirror, 2020
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Dad, 2019
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Yushi Li is a Chinese artist based in London, working primarily in photography. She received her MA in Photography recently and is doing her PhD in Arts & Humanities at the Royal College of Art. Li was selected as one of the artists for Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2018 and nominated as one of the 100 RPS Hundred Heroines in 2019. Her work mainly engages with the question of the gaze in relation to gender, desire and sexuality, culminating in the investigation of the male representation as an erotic subject in light of digital social networks.
The Lovers, 2020
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Paintings, Dreams and Love
In this series of photographs, I project my fantasies onto the male figure to continue my investigation of male representations as an erotic subject. By looking at certain classical paintings in art history, I try to reflect on these representations of the female body and make my own portrayal of the body of desire. My desire, dreams and love for the desired body are illustrated in a photographic form, using animals and fantastic settings. In these photographs, the female figure is no longer the incarnation of someone else’s dream or desire, but the creator of her own stories.
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The Veil, diptych, 2020
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The Death of Actaeon, 2020
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The Dream of the Fisher-woman, 2018
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Salmon, video still, 2020
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I Hope You Like What You Have Seen
In this project, I am trying to curate a series of videos of different male strangers performing different mundane activities for me via Skype. These men are the ones who contacted me by emails or online messages, saying that they want to be shown in my work. Their desire to be looked at opens up the complicated relationship between the voyeur and the exhibitionist. During these chats, I try to instruct these men’s behaviour through my text or voice messages without showing myself in person or via the webcam. My attempt to be in full control of them is demonstrated not only through directing what they do and how they do it, but also by executing the power inherent in their total visibility and my invisibility. By creating these visual pleasures for possibly both sides of the screen, I try to explore how the power dynamic inherent in the gaze has changed in the Internet age.
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49 Orange Juice, video still, 2020
Bath, video still, 2020
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Joshua Tarplin (American) collaborates with photographic technology to understand what images are and how images influence humans in using our imagination to build our conception of ourselves and our collectively imagined world. His anxiety stems from the contingency and arbitrary nature of these influences, progressively accumulated like lost codes throughout eons of history. In our time of an accelerating global network of images he works to provide a stressfree point of view of the mysterious claims images make of us (often by reinterpreting possibility within a queer perspective). Josh holds degrees in Art and the History of Art from Yale University, has exhibited nationally and internationally, and lives in Los Angeles with his cameras Wallace, Camille, and Frank.
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A Stress-Free Point of View, 2019
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A Stress-Free Point of View
I wonder about the disconnect between my life as I experience it and my life as I imagine it. I wonder about the difference between our world in actuality and our world as we imagine it together (possibility). In A StressFree Point of View, I wonder about the power of images accumulated throughout history to infect the meaning of one’s life. I use my life as an example through which to understand and come to peace with this unredeemable system – a turbulent sea of images constantly (and arbitrarily) regulating how we build our conceptions of the world through our imaginings. Images surround us and influence our individual and collective imaginations. Images claim for their subject territory in the imagination of the viewer. Claims can have many purposes – whether to solidify state power or sway my mother’s buying habits – but each claim employs the same subtle mode of regulating our imaginations. Claims might be disguised as other claims or might not look anything like claims at all. We have always imagined about images and their claims because, and especially during our time of an accelerating global network of images, they have constantly bombarded us (looming stone, icon, royal portrait, Instagram…among other lineages). Do you also feel anxious reconciling your experience in the world with your imagining of the world? And doing so according to the mysterious claims made by never-ending onslaughts of images? I find it relaxing to make images because, wandering through them, I can try to recognize their power to amplify, filter, and suppress how I imagine the world. Among my images I come to recognize and value the disconnect between the actual world built up of competing claims and the fresh, possible world of my imagination, easing the anxiety of trying to know things as I imagine them. I am always hoping to uncover a more faithful picture of myself and my world fashioned by the wild ambiguity of photographs – I am always hoping to offer a stress-free point of view.
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Industrial Complex I (Paradigm), 2019
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Something 4 The Summertime, 2019
Waiting for the Smoke to Clear, 2019
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Homunculus I, 2019
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Champion I, 2019 → ↓ Laocoon & Sons Co, 2019
↑ Buns’o’Steel, 2019 Champion II, 2019 →
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↑ Take a Minute Now, Come Sit Down, 2019 Champion II, 2019 →
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What Can You See… On the Horizon, 2019
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Putting on My Music While I Am Watching the Boys, 2019 → ↓ Industrial Complex II, 2019
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↑ Spring Home from Hell, 2019 ↖ Girls on Film, 2019 ← In Your Gray, in This Cool Shade, 2019
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Yuxin Jiang is an artist working to challenge the thinking on intersectional identity issues through analysing cultural forms, such as languages, image culture, and her own living experience of becoming a global citizen. Her practice is shifting towards one that is collaborative and functional with an increased interest in situating her work beyond the art context. She lives and works in London and Shanghai. Recent projects include part of Syllabus (2019/2020), a UK-wide artist development programme; translation of the Chinese edition of Photography: The Key Concepts; exhibition-based work Five Events and Some Observations on Identity, which won Lianzhou Foto Festival Jury Prize 2018 and a finalist for Jimei x Arles Discovery Award 2017.
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Body from the Beyond series, 2020
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The Instagram Project
The Instagram Project is a constellation of works looking at the Instagram images that knowingly or not participate in the construction and consumption of the Chinese as a spectacle of the other yet often mistaken as the societal reality. With a satirical and analytical approach, the project takes the images (and the words accompanying them) out of Instagram, dissects, alters, and repurposes them to create new meanings and contexts. Each work within the project tackles a certain type of images with a specific method, undoing the underlying ethnocentric value judgements that fuel the popularity of them. Quirky Science Questions and Provocative Jokes Deconstructed are two works from the project.
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Quirky Science Questions
A set of unexpected science questions devised based on images and video clips from Instagram. The reading of the images shifts as they are given a new function, liberating them from the narrow-minded. The questions are produced in collaboration with Theodora Ntoka, an education researcher with a quirky scientific mind.
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Provocative Jokes Deconstructed
A handful of the numerous Instagram jokes made at the expense of the objectification of real people are deconstructed, each broken into three parts – people, words, captions. The flicking through jokes, ready to be laughed at, are turned into separate entities demanding viewers’ attention and thinking, making up their own minds on what is at stake with these secret pleasures.
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Anka Gregorczyk – visual artist based in Poland; focused on modern landscape and visual reinterpretation of the human space. Her artistic interests are mostly directed towards art documentary photography. Currently working on the subject of spatial and social isolation and human adaptation to life in Space. Member of the The Association of Polish Art Photographers. Initiator, member and president of FOTSPOT Association. Graduate of Urban Planning Studies at the University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznan, student of Photography at the University of Arts in Poznań. She creates a photographic duo with Łukasz Szamałek and together they own and run the Gallery CENTRALA in Poznań.
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Body from the Beyond series, 2020
Our appearance will undergo constant transformation not due to the passing of time, but mainly due to the lack of gravity.
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Body
from the Beyond series Beyond the limitless space, the universe spreads before man with an immeasurable uncertainty. Without gravity, our bodies will not be human anymore and our humanity will depend on technology. How will our evolution adapt to the new environment? Will the limitations of the human body ever allow us to overcome the limitations of our minds?
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We reach for the unknown, we aim for the impossible, we cross possible boundaries and then we adapt. 97
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Body is the chapter of the Be yond project about technological and scientific development related to the quest to discover and colonize the cosmos and to prepare people for life outside the Earth. In Body, I study the future of man as a physical being in outer space. I am interested in how humans can adapt to new conditions. I use my own experience and the limitations of my body and health to study possible ways of adaptation to the new environment. I also use archival material from NASA and ESA. Part of the project was created in cooperation with radiologist Dr Aleksander Waśniowski from Lunares Space and studio3D.com.pl
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Fluids make up about 60 percent of the human body weight, and through the course of evolution we developed systems that balance the blood flow to the heart and brain. These systems continue to work without gravity, therefore causing fluid to accumulate at the top of the body, affecting the brain, heart working and blood pressure. Faces look different, accumulation of fluid in the eye also blurs the vision until the brain learns to compensate and correct the image. Bones lose density, the spine stretches and fingernails delamination may happen. The human body gets weaker.
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Descriptions: p. 70
The difference between the past and the future of
p. 80 ↖
the human body is visible in the fine detail showing its
Test start of the first Polish suborbital rocket PERUN in Drawsko Military Training Area.
ability to adapt to new conditions. This is a CT scan of the 2500-year-old mummy hand.
p. 72-73
Manned space missions to Mars have been in our
p. 80 ↓
NASA scientists claim that male astronauts with
dreams and conceptual plans since the beginning of
a hand circumference larger than 23 cm have a 20
the 20th century. Scientists predict that the first actual
percent probability of fingernail injury.
manned mission will be launched in the mid-2030s.
p. 76-77
p. 78
The human eye and brain may have trouble recognizing
p. 81 ↗
Without gravity, up and down do not matter. The
colors and assessing the distance or shape of objects
human brain loses information about the orienta-
due to changes in pressure and lack of gravity that cause
tion of our body, losing the feeling of arms and legs
flattening of the eyeballs and optic neuritis.
and mixing them up.
Our appearance will undergo constant transformation not due to the passing of time, but mainly due to the
p. 82
Using bionic body parts or bionic elements will become a part of everyday human life.
lack of gravity.
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EXHIBITION
Proofreading
Zohreh Deldadeh would like thank to:
Artists
Catalogue accompanies the exhibition: “Some-Bodies; Narratives around the Other Body” that was for the first time
Translateria.pl Nuno Ricou Salgado, Rebeca Bonjour and other Parallel team
presented online as part of the International Festival of Photography,
Elsa Gregersdotter
Printer
members for all their hard effort to maintain the program in
Fotofestiwal in Lodz in August 2020
Yushi Li
OLTOM Łódź
this difficult time.
Joshua Tarplin
Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger and Nomaduma Masilela for their
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission.
Yuxin Jiang
RISO prints
valuable help and great curatorial support through the project
All images are © the artists, reproduced only with the permission of the artists and/or
Anka Gregorczyk
X-Press
development.
their representatives.
Curator
Binding
Franek Ammer for his support and companionship.
Zohreh Deldadeh
Wypierdalaj
Bartłomiej Talaga for doing a great design for the catalog.
Project manager
Print run
Mafalda Duarte Barrela, Eszter Erdosi and Tytus Szabelski for
Franek Ammer
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being such inspiring and amazing friends.
“Kind Curators” fellows: Yuliya Ruzhechka, Javiera Cadiz Bedini,
The artist’s mentors: Joao Pina, Natasha Caruana, Francoise CATALOGUE
ISBN
Poos, Laia Abril and Stratos Kalafatis for their valuable mentoring
978-83-60794-72-2
toward to the artists.
Edition Lodz Fotofestiwal / Parallel Platform
Behnam Sadighi for his encouragement, assistance and support. www.some-bodies.parallelplatform.org Team members of Fotofestiwal for their hospitality during the
Design
internship week in Lodz.
Bartłomiej Talaga Team members of Capa Center in Budapest and PhotoIreland Text
in Dublin for being great hosts during the intersection and
Zohreh Deldadeh
curatorship programs of the 3rd cycle.
M Sarvi Zargar This project would not have happened without all of your support.
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Anka Gregorczyk → Body from the Beyond series, 2020
Created in 2001, one of the first photographic events
original Photo-Match portfolio review for even more
Fluid in its nature and purpose, contemporary photog-
new creators; followed by Exhibition Platform: a wide
in Poland: a small-scale, spontaneous initiative of
effective creation of collaborative networks, while re-
raphy remains an ever-evolving discipline of discovery
exhibition network engaging exhibitors, universities
a group of Sociology students. Today, the festival is an
ducing the distance between experts and artists. This
and exploration, walking along the lines of definitions.
and art schools.
international event attended by more than 20,000
formula has already been adopted at other festivals
The artists, curators and members of PARALLEL fully
people every year.
around the world, such as PhotoLux in Italy and the
embrace this challenge - their hybrid approach to the
PARALLELis supported by the Creative Europe Program,
Triennial of Photography Hamburg. Apart from pho-
core elements of photography, light and time, challeng-
designed and lead by Procur.arte, a Lisbon based cul-
The festival is held annually in Lodz – a city with an
tography exhibitions and events for experts, we are
es us to take part in redefining the artistic, cultural and
tural association.
exceptional industrial history, which has always
equally committed to arranging gigs and meetings
social value of contemporary photography.
been a source of inspiration for the organizers. The
with the public. We treat the festival as a meeting
exhibitions are set in post-industrial settings: the
hub, and photography as a point of departure for
PARALLEL aims to establish an extensive and effective
Art_Inkubator festival centre in a former cotton
vital discussions.
exhibition platform for European new artists and cura-
storage facility or the impressive redbrick OFF Piotr-
tors and promote a fluent and functional link between
kowska complex located in the heart of the city. We
For us, the festival is a space for experiments and
them and exhibitors (museums, galleries and festivals).
discover Lodz for ourselves as well as for our viewers
new experiences not only in the field of art ex-
Created in 2017, PARALLEL brings together 17 creative
– every year new venues are opened especially for
hibitions, but also in the organization of cultur-
European organisations from 16 countries, committed
festival events. All over the city, you can enjoy over
al events, which is why for several years now we
to fostering cross-cultural exchanges and mentorships
30 exhibitions, organised in cooperation with local
have been organizing it as a collective of curators,
in order to set new standards in contemporary pho-
art galleries.
promotion and finance specialists and cultur-
tography. The large and diverse nature of this network
al managers. There is no boss in our team – we
ensures a wide geographical spread and a fertile ground
Fotofestiwal has hosted exhibitions, workshops
make decisions together and share our knowledge
for fostering new dialogues, sparking fresh ideas and
and meetings with artists such as Alex Webb, Roger
with one another
helping to boost creativity. The work is implemented as
Ballen, Joan Fontcuberta, Vivianne Sassen, Christina de Middel and Martin Kollar. We have developed our
a two-phase process, starting with Creative Guidance: www.fotofestiwal.com
selection, tutoring, peer learning and curatorship for
PARALLEL PLATFORM MEMBERS
Procur.arte, Lisboa Portugal (Project Leader) Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, Modena, Italy Format International Photography Festival – Derby Quad Derby, UK FotoFestiwal – Foundation of Visual Education, Łódź, Poland Galleri Image Aarhus, Denmark ISSP Riga, Latvia Katalog – Journal of Photography & Video, Kerteminde, Denmark Kaunas Photography Gallery, Kaunas, Lithuania Landskrona Foto, Landskrona, Sweden Odessa Photo Days Odessa, Ukraine Organ Vida, Zagreb, Croatia PhotoIreland, Dublin, Ireland Robert Capa Contemporary Center, Budapest, Hungary The Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki, Finland UGM – Maribor Art Gallery Maribor, Slovenia YET Magazine Lausanne, Switzerland Tbilisi Photography & Multimedia Museum Tiblisi, Georgia
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www.parallelplatform.org