Curator: He Yining
Artists: Alexandra Lethbridge, Cheng Xinhao , Tommaso Tanini (Discipula), He Bo & Xu Lei Julio Galeote, Li Chaoyu, Yang Yuanyuan, Zhang Zhizhou
There is a baffling power that photography has: it’s a source of reliable evidence, a means to document atrocity; it’s a proof of data, and one of the most effective ways to recreate historical events. However, with the advent of photography as an artform, photographers and artists alike have begun to use photographs to construct fictional narratives. These narratives test the boundaries between the real and the imagined, snaring viewers in suspended belief and convincing them that what they are presented with is a reality. Across the spectrum of contemporary photography, from Joan Fontcuberta to Zoe Leonard to Walid Raad, many influential photographers have used the image as a means to create a fictional archive. In doing so, they have broadened the band through which a photo’s narrative can be told and challenged the authority that photography has to define what is truly history.
‘A Fictional Narrative Turn’ focuses on the varying creative practices of 8 photographers. Through both a historical and cultural lens, the show considers the possibilities created when a photograph’s relationship with reality is challenged; moreover, it seeks to understand what function photographs serve when constructing a fictional narrative. Throughout the exhibition this develops in different ways.
The works of British photographer Alexandra Lethbridge serve as a mythical metaphor for everyday life in ‘The Meteorite Hunter’; Cheng Xinhao’s ‘Time from Different Sources’ is a body of work that deconstructs and then regroups the buildings, objects, images and people from Saman village of the different historical origins. He Bo and Xu Lei explore the symbolic development of the selfie in the 1980’s in ‘Selfiers: Sealed with Images’; Julio Galeote’s ‘Tropical Ornament’, which investigates the relationship between reality and fiction and its representation, consists a first stage of documentation of historical images from Miami’s photographic archive and second images that constructed in his study. Li Chaoyu’s ‘After One Hundred Years’ revisits the greatest inventions and discoveries of the 20th Century; and Italian photographer Tommaso Tanini reflects on totalitarianism in East Germany in ‘H. said he loved us.’ In another vein, Yang Yuanyuan discusses the history of photography and its development as a medium in ‘At the Place of Crossed Sight (Part one),’ looking at how the relationships between photographers, photos, cities, and memories have become inexorably tangled together. Lastly, Zhang Zhizhou uses his works in ‘Photographer S——After Masahisa Fukase’ to focus his gaze on the inner workings of photography itself, using an imagined ‘photographer S,’ to recreate the intertwined nature of the photographer and the history of photography.
These six works stem from different historical events and the different views of each photographer on how contemporary culture seeps into every day life. It is through this series of imagined characters, events, and objects that these archives, photographs, creations, and installations are able to truly interact.
