PROGRAMMING


Artist Projects

Three Artists have been commissioned by photo MIAMI to create solo installations at the fair.

John Neff (Chicago), Orlan (Paris) and Raul Vincent Enriquez(New York).



John Neff

John Neff's presentation of new photographic and video pieces at photo Miami 2008 will mix images of nude male bathers with works based on his ongoing series depicting a nautical history of the United States in the late twentieth century. The bather images, large-format cyanotype prints on clear Plexiglas or siliconized paper, will be presented on the specially constructed transparent exterior wall of his exhibition booth. The nautical subject, a monitor-bound video composed from blue-tinted archival footage related to the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole and a collection of official portraits of sailors who perished in that bombing, will be shown in the booth's dim interior, a space that will be furnished to resemble a makeshift bureaucratic office. The project's title, Father, can't you see I'm burning?, refers to a Freudian dream narrated on the video's soundtrack. That soundtrack brings together found audio from two sources: a strangely poetic internet live show from a military-themed gay porn site and a lecture by philosopher Slavoj Zizek discussing the relationship between external violence and internal traumas in psychoanalysis. This textual juxtaposition describes the spatial and visual inversions performed by the project. Those inversions - such as a viewer's experience of the "private" bathers before the "public" naval memorial - suggest the degree to which private and public, and personal and political, events and identities are not just interpenetrated but actually constitutive of one another in contemporary American society.

Raul Vincent Enriquez

For photo Miami 2008, Raul Vincent Enriquez will present a selection of moving image portraits, pinups and still lifes. All of his moving image work is derived from hundreds, sometimes thousands, of digital photographs meticulously sequenced and aligned to create a calm fixed point of focus surrounded by errant chaotic movement.

Enriquez works to create moments in which something real, true, and often uncomfortable (but at its base, beautiful) breaks the bonds of expectation, habit, or social convention. His work is saturated with emotional vulnerability, but always as frank as possible.

In this installation Orlan underlines the porosities between art, fashion, design and their connection to photography, be it documentary or not.

Orlan exhibits a new series of works initiated in the Musée d’Art Moderne of the city of Saint-Etienne, France (her native place), by hybridizing, recycling her wardrobe in collaboration with fashion designer Maroussia Rebecq.

Orlan has created a new version further developed of the series at the Espacio de Artes Visuales de Murcia Cultural, this time in collaboration with fashion designer Davidelfin.

On this occasion, Orlan has dressed up Philippe Starck’s “Louis Ghost” armchair.

At photo MIAMI 2008, Orlan presents a new installation including a series of photographs referring to this experience, that is the counteremploying of Philippe Starck’s armchairs as the hybridized and recycled clothes make the ghosts vanish.

Orlan shows that she doesn’t believe in ghosts, but in bodies’ warmth, in the free speech exchanged, conceiving the space of the booth first and foremost as an interface of exchanges.

She counteremploys fashion photography by using the same androgynous model, seen from the back, with no identity and shown horizontally as if in weightlessness, along the border of the ceiling, like a frieze.

A video-performance titled suture/secularism (“suture/laicité”) will be projected in the space. It is based on a text by the French philosopher Michel Serres who understands the figure of the harlequin as a metaphor of the acceptance of the other in oneself and of tolerance, since his costume is made of colors and pieces of fabric from different origins.

The artist new monograph “Orlan+Davidelfin” will contextualize the installation especially conceived for Miami photo artfair.