Time Present
Contemporary Photography from the Deutsche Bank Collection
October 3, 2014–February 8, 2015
SAM at 8Q
Singapore Art Museum
8 Queen Street
Singapore
It is a journey through time in several respects. Encompassing some 80 works, Time Present—Contemporary Photography from the Deutsche Bank Collection presents an international panorama of contemporary art photography at the Singapore Art Museum. The exhibition, which debuts in Singapore with a special edition curated in partnership with the Singapore Art Museum, will travel to museums across Asia. It shows for the first time the wide spectrum of international contemporary photography that Deutsche Bank has collected over the course of three decades.
The work ranges from classics like Bernd and Hilla Becher and Hiroshi Sugimoto to contemporary art photography from the Middle East, South Africa, and China. The exhibition illuminates the transformation photography has undergone in contemporary art since the 1970s and documents the various formal, conceptual, and performative approaches that have expanded it as an artistic medium.
Time Present takes a thematic approach by introducing various different aspects of photography and of time itself in four sections: “Time Exposed” brings together positions that question the boundaries between the static and moving image, between time as it is perceived objectively and subjectively. The section “Today is the Past” explores photography as a medium that makes personal and collective history legible, while “A Moment of Intense Concentration” investigates the fraught relationship between documentation and dramatic presentation—the unique moment that is capable of telling an entire story. The exhibition concludes with the section “My Future Is Not a Dream,” in which urgent social issues form the point of departure for articulating fears of the future, as well as hope and utopian vision.
Time Present also illustrates how the focus of the Deutsche Bank Collection has expanded since the late 1990s from German photographers including Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Ruff to photo artists from Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. In addition to proponents of the Düsseldorf School, artists such as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, as well as American photographers like Philip-Lorca di Corcia, positions that are devoted to migration, technological change, feminism, and urbanity comprise a focal point of the show. These are joined by women artists such as Dayanita Singh (India), Yto Barrada (Morocco), and Cao Fei (China). It is not merely a part of the collection’s history that is presented here, but a wider historical perspective on how the photographic view of the world has radically changed over time.
Time Present takes place in the collective framework of “Still Moving: A Triple Bill on the Image,” where the Singapore Art Museum presents three concurrent exhibitions that examine contemporary image-making. In addition to Time Present, Singapore Art Museum is co-curating an exhibition of Southeast Asian contemporary photography with the Singapore International Photography Festival, as well as a presentation of Japanese new media and video works from the collection of the Yokohama Museum of Art.
More information at db.com/art and db-artmag.com.
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