Objects Recognized in Flashes

How are analogue and digital images handled in our largely mediatised society? What is the state of play when it comes to the relationship between material and immateriality, between body, screen and photographic surface?

If one looks at media outlets or social platforms in digital space today, it is easy to glean the impression that the world consists primarily of goods and advertising. Products and commodity aesthetics are ubiquitous and shape our engagement with photographic images to an unprecedented degree. The omnipresence of these stagings creates imaginary standards, which have now become an integral part of permanent photographic self-presentation. The aesthetic strategies of commercial photography also have ramifications for current artistic debates. The fascination and contradictoriness that emanate from product photography are echoed in art that sheds light on the associated mechanisms of enticement and concealment, as well as turning the way it plays with desire, enjoyment, and identification against the mainstream itself.

Objects Recognized in Flashes brings together four artists who respond to the enormous significance of studio, product or fashion photography and address their production forms, distribution strategies and aesthetics in their own work. The surfaces of photographs, products, and bodies as interfaces between optics and object make the contemporary relationship between aesthetics, imagination, and matter just as worthy of interrogation as the economic mechanisms underlying this relationship, mechanisms which are also brought to the surface in some of these works. Michele Abeles, Annette Kelm, Josephine Pryde, and Eileen Quinlan each deploy manifold artistic and photographic strategies within their oeuvre, spanning a still broader spectrum when their work is viewed together.

Exhibition catalogue, Objects Recognized in Flashes
Ed. By Matthias Michalka, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien
Essays by Tom McDonough, Matthias Michalka, Juliane Rebentisch; includes a text developed from the artists’ answers to questions by the curator.
Graphic design: Clemens Jahn; 250 pages approx.; format: 214 × 270 mm; 200 ill. approx., mostly in color
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln 2019
English edition:
ISBN (mumok): 978-3-902947-79-6
ISBN (König): 978-3-96098-7321

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