Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined
Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined offers an insight into photographic approaches that critically engage with ‘the archive’ to re-address the past and bring to the fore histories that have been overlooked.
It presents the work of Alba Zari, Amin Yousefi, Eleonora Agostini, Emi O’Connell, Jermaine Francis, Laura Chen, Odette England, and Tarrah Krajnak.
Three ways of working with archives are presented in the exhibition. In some works, photographers place themselves at the centre of the archive and re-enact histories that have been forgotten. Others imagine histories that allow them to make sense of the world or to discuss fiction and truth in photography. Lastly, some give new meanings to archival materials by interrogating the gaze within the history of photography.
Together the work of these eight photographers explores the relationships between the archive and time and memory, the public and the private, fact and fiction, and trauma.
Launching at Peckham 24 in London, during the largest annual weekend of photography in the UK, the exhibition will tour to Impressions Gallery this summer.
This exhibition is co-curated by Peckham 24 and Impressions Gallery.
Images top: to fear him and and then I ran from the series and then I ran, 2023 © Emi O’Connell.
Artists
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Alba Zari
Artist
Born in Bangkok, Zari has led a nomadic life that greatly influences her photographic practice. Zari employs the photographic medium as a tool for investigation and self-analysis, questioning its ability to function as a trace, clue, testimonial evidence, and its deceptive nature. Her seemingly rigorous and scientific approach conceals a deeply poetic interpretative capacity of themes of memory and identity.
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Amin Yousefi
Artist
A native of Abadan in the province of Khuzestan, Iran’s most oil-rich region, and the scene of a war with neighbouring Iraq, Yousefi’s work examines the event of photography through the socio-political aspect of the medium. His primary concern lies in the implications of the archive, exploring violence against protests in the Middle East enacted by the state and how the act of photography can conceptually mirror the structures of these relationships.
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Eleonora Agostini
Artist
Agostini explores and analyses the difficulties of how human experience is constructed using photography, moving image, performance and sculpture. Her research is strongly connected with the experience of our surroundings and she is interested in finding a possible fracture within our socially constructed rules and the spaces we inhabit.
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Emi O'Connell
Artist
O’Conell’s work focuses on equality and women’s health. She is particularly interested in phototherapy and using visual arts as a way to sensitively approach topics of trauma. O'Connell combines self- portraiture, documentary photography re-enactment, and other performative elements throughout her research-based work. Emi’s intimate and sensitive approach uses primarily analogue photography and cameraless techniques such as lumen printing.
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Jermaine Francis
Artist
Francis is a London-based photographer who works within the discourse of documentary, landscape, portraiture and moving image. He explores our physical and historical, psychological negotiation of space, through subjects such as power, class, race, social, political and their visual manifestations.
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Laura Chen
Artist
Chen is a Dutch photographer, collage artist and writer. Her visual discourse is highly intuitive, experimental and playful. Within her interdisciplinary practice, research, implementation and intervention are closely intertwined. She often employs a mixed-media approach, combining image with text and analogue photomontage techniques. Drawn to the obscurities and idiosyncrasies of the mundane, she searches for forms of otherness in the everyday and a connection with the subconscious.
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Odette England
Artist
England is a photographer and writer and has exhibited her work in more than 115 museums and galleries worldwide. She is a 2022 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and has received grants and awards from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Puffin Foundation, and Anonymous Was a Woman, among many others. She has been nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award (twice) and the Prix Pictet. England has also published four award-winning books and has another two debuting in 2024.
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Tarrah Krajnak
Artist
Krajnak is an artist working across photography, performance, and poetry. She was born in Lima, Peru in 1979, and currently lives in Eugene, Oregon. Krajnak is represented by Zander Galerie, Cologne. She is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, and was recently awarded the Jury Prize of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles, the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies, and the Hariban Grand Prize, Kyoto, Japan.
Our visitors say...
”Thank you for sharing this work, it is very powerful and affecting. Particularly Alba Zari and Emi O’Connell. Really brought home to me the reality of really quite recent history and how this informs our culture today.”
”You all breathe new life into the dust-covered archive… What a wonderful body of work from you all!’
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