Harkawik is delighted to announce Pictures on Fridges, the extensively anticipated follow-up to our 2022 Works on Paper on Fridges, and our closing exhibition to make use of family home equipment as pedestals. The fridge occupies a peculiar place in fashionable life—concurrently indispensable and invisible, a buzzing presence we discover nearly solely when it breaks down. By introducing these home equipment into the gallery as equipment of show, the area of aesthetic contemplation is superimposed onto atypical life—every made seen via the opposite, neither absolutely secure—the white dice and the house flickering out and in of legibility. The fridge disrupts the gallery’s fiction of neutrality, however solely lengthy sufficient to note a few of conventional pictures’s closely-held guidelines.
This home body attracts a spotlight round portraiture, the quotidian, and artists who flip their cameras on what’s nearest: their very own properties, our bodies, and the intimate textures of their lives. Portraiture anchors the present as a web site the place private and collective histories converge, bringing collectively artists who implicate themselves of their work—whether or not by showing as interlocutor, photographing collaborators and household, or foregrounding the equipment of manufacturing itself. A number of flip their very own our bodies into websites of transgression, enacting or refusing what pictures usually calls for of its topics—legibility, compliance, the carried out availability of the self. Others take this inquiry additional, demonstrating pictures’s cannibalization of context, its distinctive propensity to reabsorb and instrumentalize, to flatten radical gesture into fashion. Many intentionally borrow tropes from vogue, documentary, and vernacular pictures solely to unravel them, producing pictures that oscillate between candid documentation and staged self-consciousness. By framing the appropriation of visible languages as a type of readymade, the exhibition situates up to date meta-photography inside a lineage of interventions which have each formed the medium’s improvement and unsettled its claims to fact, id, and illustration.
The fridge door makes no distinction between the numerous and the atypical; right here, masterworks cling alongside snapshots, ephemera, vernacular and nameless footage. Pictures on Fridges traces the constructed picture from the delivery of the medium to the current second, when pictures has develop into an nearly automated every day exercise—and proposes that the ocean of pictures we now encounter every day, a product of the destabilization of the medium’s conventional tenets, may not usher alongside the dying of the chemical picture however characterize its apotheosis. Maybe the standard home floor is the place the place each can land, be held, and be seen once more. Whereas practically all works make use of photographic processes, the inquiry is broader: how artists outline the self via the opposite, and the way the portrait—contested, nuanced, endlessly re-negotiated—stays certainly one of visible artwork’s most enduring topics.
