Joan FONTCUBERTA
Monsters
To 27 May
Rencontres de la jeune photographie internationale 2023
Guest of honor
The old world – photography as a promise of truth and memory – is dying, and the new world – images generated by artificial intelligence – is struggling to emerge. From document to speculation, from natural images to false ones, in this exhibition Joan Fontcuberta proposes to trace the chiaroscuro, while pointing the finger at emerging monstrosities: monstrosities of language, technique, politics, history. In Latin, “monstrum” was a religious term for a prodigy, a supernatural event, and from “monstrum” derive “monstrare” and “demonstrare” : to show and demonstrate, verbs that take us back to the world of experience and knowledge. This time, we’re going to try and show the monsters.
Monstres thus ventures through a series of conflicts and violence of our time, always trying to save, however, what still makes us human and commits us to values that reject barbarism. He presents half a dozen recent projects, both poetic and disruptive, ranging from Trauma to Prosopagnosia (produced with Pilar Rosado). An alpha and an omega: from the debris of photography – images from archives and family albums that become damaged and amnesiac, while their most terrible beauty shines through – to predictions of possible futures and algorithms, which we don’t know whether they are nightmares or guarantees of progress.
Between the critical gaze and the conceptual, between the poetic and the humorous, Fontcuberta tries to ensure that images cease to be inhospitable territory: if Francisco de Goya’s precept stated that “the dream of reason produces monsters”, we must assume the duty of overturning it, and make the dream of monsters produce reason. In short, we must try to rethink photography, and thus tame monsters.
Series presented:
Trauma, Élevage de poussière, À la mémoire, Gastropoda, Fahrenheit 451, Prosopagnosia, Phrenographies.
“Il vecchio mondo sta morendo. Quello nuovo tarda a comparire. E in questo chiaroscuro nascono i mostri”
“The old world is dying. The new is slow to appear. And in this chiaroscuro, monsters are born.”
Antonio Gramsci
Practical information
Biography
In addition to his work as a visual artist in the field of photography, Joan Fontcuberta, born in Barcelona in 1955, is active as a teacher, critic, curator and historian.
Through the manipulation of the photographic image, he develops a body of work that questions the effects of reality and the capacity for truth produced by the technological image. In a logic of denunciation of authoritarian discourse in the context of information, he dismantles, through various series – Herbarium, Fauna, Spoutnik, Les Sirènes de Digne, Miracles et Cie… – the language specific to the disciplines of science, information and other vectors of knowledge. His latest projects focus on the nature and function of the image in digital culture.
Between 1978 and 1986, he taught at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts. He then went on to become a visiting professor at various centers and universities in Europe and the United States (Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Harvard University in Cambridge, U.S.A., University of Wales in the U.K., Le Fresnoy in France).
Non-exhaustive bibliography: Le baiser de Judas. Photographie et vérité (ed. Actes Sud, Arles, 1996); Science et Friction, Photographie, Nature, Artifice (ed. Mestizo, Murcia, 1998); Le boîtier de Pandore. La photogr@phie après la photographie (ed. Textuel, Paris, 2017);La fúria de las imágenes. Notas sobre la postfotografía (ed. Galaxia Gutemberg, Barcelona, 2016)…
Major solo exhibitions: MoMA (New York, 1988), M.I.T. (Cambridge, 1988), Cantini Museum (Marseille, 1990), Art Institute (Chicago, 1990), IVAM (Valencia, 1992), MNAC (Barcelona, 1999), Museum of Fine Arts (Fukui, Japan), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Roma, 2001), ARTIUM (Vitoria / Gasteiz, 2003), Center de la Imatge / Palau de la Virreina (Barcelona, 2008), Maison européenne de la pho- tographie (Paris, 2014), Science Museum (London, 2014), Museum Angewandte Kunst (Frankfurt, 2015), and Museo de Arte del Banco de la República (Bogotá, 2016).