Witness: Patricia Aridjis "las horas negras"
© Patricia Aridjis
VASA Witness Exhibition Series
About Witness
The Witness exhibition project presents the work of photographers and filmmakers who employ the lens as a vehicle for social commentary, what traditionally is referred to as documentary or reportage. In no way does the series assume the camera to be free of the contextual framework of the mind behind it. The camera that records to chip or film is not separated from the mind that points it. The photographer is not removed from the camera she uses, the lens directing the light, the edges of the frame, or her history, and the history of images and image making in her culture. The decision to stand where one does is not by chance but by one’s history. We live in a social, political, and economic world, gaining its meaning from an historical context. The resulting image of the metaphorical click signifies an intelligence that is shaped by history, intention, and human interest.
Witness is not intended to be an empirical report on the world, but a story.
Photographs and films (video) are made as the result of decisive acts, not decisive moments. The decision to point the camera or stand in a place at a particular time, are not made by a neutral observer or machine, but by an intelligence, acting on the world from a point of interest. There never was or will be disinterested or non-contextualized images. Each image (or set of images) is the result of an intention and an understanding of what an image looks like and what the intended function is or will be.
For the readers of “las horas negras” (all viewers read the image(s) as a text produced for consumption. A film, as is a photograph, a poem, or painting, is created to be experienced. An image's significance is constructed through its own historical placement, one that is biased as is the image and the image-maker. In this sense the reader of the text is also a witness, a witness to the biases of the medium of photography and film/video, the image-maker, the curator, and VASA Exhibitions. If one views an image(s) or a film, and does not reflect upon the experience from both sides of its frame, one’s relationship to the image; then the point is lost. Of course it can be argued that in the act of “meaning making”, the viewer is reflecting and constructing the experience herself. No experience exists outside the viewer.
“Witness” will engage various curators who bring their own perceptions and understandings to the selection and display of the work. “Witness” has its own bias, giving light, but not limited to images emerging from Eastern Europe and developing countries. As with all VASA exhibitions, each exhibition will be archived and available for viewing in the future.
VASA Curatorial Team and Roberto Muffoletto, Director VASA