黑料不打烊

Slought Foundation is pleased to announce Visual Correspondences, an exhibition of photographs that explore the possibility of communicating through purely visual means, on display from April 19 to June 30, 2011. The project is curated by Eduardo Cadava in consultation with Marcelo Brodsky, and features artists Manel Esclusa (Spain), Pablo Ortiz Monasterio (Mexico), Martin Parr (England), Cassio Vasconcellos (Brazil), Marcelo Brodsky (Argentina), and Horst Hoheisel (Germany). A opening reception will take place on April 19, 2011 from 6:30-8:30pm, and will be preceded by a symposium beginning at 4:30pm featuring the artists and curators in conversation.

Visual Correspondences also serves as the basis for a series of community-based workshops that invite teenagers from South Philadelphia High School to engage in a related series of artistic interventions. These workshops are led by Youth Facilitators Neena Pathak and Kate Mollison of the Slought Foundation. Together with the exhibition and symposium, they have been organized in conjunction with The Itinerant Languages of Photography, a three-year research initiative organized by Eduardo Cadava and Gabriela Nouzeilles that will sponsor a companion workshop at Princeton University on April 20th, 2011.

Visual Correspondences was first initiated by Marcelo Brodsky and Manel Esclusa in Barcelona and Buenos Aires, and then proceeded to include the aforementioned photographers and artists. Using the internet as the means of delivery for the correspondences, Brodsky sent a photograph to one of the artists, who in turn responded with another work. In this way, each photographer or artist would respond to the other鈥檚 last image, poetically, playfully, and intuitively combining the chance of a ready-made with the complexity of photographic memory and production. The exchanges continued for a certain amount of time and the result was a non-verbal exchange that bears the traces of emotional and intuitive discourses, humor and social commentary, a play of connection and distance, and the creation of a series of 鈥渧isual correspondences.鈥�

The first five correspondences between Brodsky and each of the other five interlocutors鈥攖here are now twelve correspondences and the number is growing鈥攚ere presented in Buenos Aires in May 2009 and will be re-exhibited at Slought Foundation. This will serve as the first exhibition of the works in North America. As a transnational, multi-media series of correspondences, the project raises questions of agency, communication, and correspondence, questions about the relation between the visual and the linguistic realms, and about the itinerancy of images in general.

What is a dialogue or correspondence? What happens when these take place in relation to images and photographs? What happens if, when I send an image to an other, the other responds to me? How do we understand what happens if this response is not made of words, but takes the form of a new image? What happens, in other words, when the ritual of sending images is superimposed onto that of the epistolary exchange? Is it possible to believe that the photographer who signs the first image is the same one who signs the exchange鈥檚 third one, or that the one who signs the second one is the same as the one who signs the correspondence鈥檚 fourth one? Or is it that each sending from the other alters our way of seeing things? To what do we respond when we respond to a sending, to what we imagine as the 鈥淚 wish to say鈥� that comes from the other? Is there a first sending, a first word or a first image? Or is it that we always begin in the middle of a conversation, interrupting the murmuring of signs that speak for us, even when we do not expect it and sometimes when we do not even imagine it? Perhaps the very idea of correspondence is a chimera. In this sense, this exhibition is not simply a presentation of work by six international photographers and artists, but a means of exploring several questions at the heart of contemporary artistic debates.