Produced by the LUMA Foundation, SYSTEMATICALLY OPEN? New Forms for Contemporary Image Production explores new structures for the presentation of the photographic image. An examination of the relationships between photography and its various modes of display, the exhibition draws upon avant-garde, political, and critically conscious legacies of aesthetic production, provides a new framework for experiencing the image as a reproduction, and prompts a structural rethinking of the photographic medium. Acknowledging a rich history of the spatial and conceptual display of images in museums and other institutions, SYSTEMATICALLY OPEN? finds precedent in a diverse set of exhibition practices, ranging from El Lissitzky’s photography-based installations of the late 1920s, to Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man — a collection of over five hundred photographs that toured the world for eight years after its initial exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955. Prompted in part by the continued influence of these exhibitions on our current moment, the LUMA Arles Core Group established a competition process to consider the contemporary importance of exhibition display, and selected architect Philippe Rahm and four artists—Walead Beshty, Elad Lassry, Zanele Muholi, and Collier Schorr — to each develop a curatorial project within Rahm’s overall exhibition design. The responses that Beshty, Lassry, Muholi, and Schorr have produced reflect the ongoing and dynamic discourse surrounding the themes of contemporary image production and circulation, photographic and presentational convention. The exhibition also marks the opening of La Mécanique Générale, a new exhibition venue in the Parc des Ateliers, renovated and expanded by Selldorf Architects.
Shutters, Frames, Collections, Repetition
Curated by Collier Schorr (b. 1963, lives and works in New York).
A collaborative dialogue between Schorr and fellow photographer Anne Collier, Shutters, Frames, Collections, Repetition consists of nudes and studies whose subjects often pose with, or are otherwise framed by, the technologies and accessories of commercial and amateur photography. A stylized collection of close-ups and portraits, the project includes several images of women holding cameras as props or posing naked next to telephoto lenses. Throughout, Schorr and Collier re-imagine what looking—and looking back—might resemble, suggesting a new dialogue between the nude and the camera.