Photo exhibition: Galerie K’ in Bremen: Naked people intoxicated

Resoundingly drastic images often appear more relentless in an art context than, for example, on a cinema screen. Perhaps because the contrast between a disembodied, spiritualized social space like a gallery and a world in which bodies show themselves in all their violence and capacity for suffering is stronger here. The collective exhibition »Photography Noir. Existence« with images by photographers Miron Zownir, Alexander Chekmenev and Rimaldas Vikšraitis: photographs of people who show themselves largely unfiltered.

What interests him about people, Zownir said in an interview, is “the half-destroyed and abandoned, perhaps what one would call ‘superfluous’ today.” The photographer, who was born in Karlsruhe in 1953, became known at the end of the 1990s with the volume “Radical Eye”. The aesthetic principle, search for motifs and design in this work have only varied minimally over the years.

As part of “Photography Noir,” photographs that Zownir took over 40 years ago, among others in New York and Moscow, are shown. The works of Alexander Chekmenev and Rimaldas Vikšraitis differ in that they were created not in urban but in rural areas. Chekmenev portrayed people in his home region of Donbass in the 1990s and 2000s. Vikšraitis documents the decline of the Lithuanian province after the end of the USSR.

Otherwise, the similarities predominate. Of course, the degree of graininess and the respective black and white of the images differ. And in Zownir’s pictures, people often take poses that suggest something like self-assertion. What all three have in common is a camera view that captures what is actually too intimate for a public presentation. Naked people intoxicated who do not look as if they have given written consent for publication; a man with a syringe in his arm, a man biting into a pig’s head.

Some things are difficult to grasp, even for the trained observer. An autopsy can be seen in a photograph by Alexander Chekmenev: a man is laughing and holding a cut-off head in one hand and small scissors in the other.

The picture is one of those in “Photography Noir. Existence”, in which realism, drama and a confrontational surreality mix. In order to really allow the ambivalent effect of these photographs to come into your own perception, you first have to get past the ethical concerns, so to speak. There is no exhibition catalog text for Miron Zownir’s pictures that does not attempt to dispel the moral concerns of the viewer that more or less inevitably arise. Ultimately, the half-destroyed, abandoned thing is presented in the gallery space to an audience who, one can say in general, are faring much better off than those depicted.

Oleksandra Osadcha tries to circumvent this in her text with a reference to the three photographers’ love and empathy for the objects in front of their camera and with two rhetorical questions: “Isn’t the ban on seeing and the regulation of visibility just the downside of putting images in to circulate? Doesn’t it lead to the same result, namely the formation of a comfortable bubble of privileged observers?” After all, the possibility of not looking is also a privilege.

That’s right. But the non-rhetorical question remains. Namely, whether one doesn’t do justice to the effect and aesthetics of these images if one doesn’t explain away the pigishness of the viewing process. When presented and viewed, the structure and gradients within which these photographs were created always appear. The contemplation of people’s bodies in filth and delirium does not lose its violent character through the reference to love and the need to perceive, even if both love and necessity may be part of its creation. And in some cases perhaps their reception as well.

»Photography Noir. Existence”, until May 18th, Galerie K’, Weberstr. 51 A, 28203 Bremen; Wed to Fri 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., Sat 12 p.m. to 4 p.m.

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