FLASH CUBE
July 5 – September 30, 2007
Gerard Byrne, David Claerbout, Thomas Demand, Jonas Dahlberg, Geert Goiris, Andreas Gursky, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Klaas Hoek, Candida Hofer, Jan Kaila, Sanggil Kim, Koo Jeong A, Aglaia Konrad, Yoon-jean Lee, Armin Linke, Hermann Pitz, Thomas Ruff, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Haegue Yang, JeongMee Yoon, Mieke Van de Voort and Jeff Wall.
Curator: Henk Slager
Coordinator: Hyesoo Woo
Since its acceptance as a form of art around the 1930s, photography has been forced as no other artistic medium to justify its medium-specific qualities. Particularly, the Greenbergian heydays of Modernism have produced such pressing urge for justification. At that moment around the end of the 1930s, painting had surpassed by far its interest in the subject of perspectivist illusion. As a consequence, painting entirely concentrated on the qualities of the two-dimensional surface implying a passion for painterly components such as planes, colors, and lines. From that time onwards, the artistic working field of perspectivist painting would be remediated by photography as an artistic medium.
However, in the artistic practice of our day, which, in line with New York-based theorist Rosalind Krauss could be said to be determined by a post-medium condition, the photographic image can no longer be viewed as a mere aesthetic registration of a situation in the real world. Rather, the topical photographic image demands the investigation of how the photograph as an imaginary medium produces diverse forms of realities and worlds which are still based on its perspectivist capacities. Such researching attitude requires a critical reevaluation – either through other media or through the history of the photographic medium – of the photographic medium as such. Subsequently, the medium-specific qualities of the photographic image have been deconstructed effecting a turn to captivating forms of spatial investigations.
Indeed one could argue that a critical attitude towards framing, centristic, and perspectivist styles of photography produced a novel generation of photographers fascinated by spatial environments and architectonic constellations. That fascination is connected with interesting, topical forms of photographic criticism on functionalist ways of thought parallel to perspectivist-based photography and on the subdivision of a 3D world into transparent, comprehensible, and instrumental entities.
The exhibition Flash Cube will chart a series of such spatial research strategies implicating a diversity of artistic points of departure such as fluid inner space, open urban space and installative space. The various photographic strategies will be mutually confronted in a transformative way in the exhibition’s methodology of mounting (floorplan) – underscored by Rem Koolhaas unique non-perspectivist display system of Leeum’s exhibition space – so that both spatial reflection and spatial experience can occur in dynamic and invigorating ways.
Paneldiscussion: Mapping Photographic Space: Thomas Demand, Jan Kaila, Sanggil Kim, Aglaia Konrad, Henk Slager, July 5, 1.00-5.00 p.m.
Opening: July 4, 6.00 p.m.
Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art
747-18, Hanam-dong, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Korea 140-893
Flash Cube was also made possible by Samsung Electronics, Cyworld, Asiana Airlines and the Mondriaan Foundation.
