© 2013 ch-arts
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SEBA KURTIS
"SHOE BOX"
02.09.2011 - 25.09.2011
Journées photographiques 2011 - Biel/Bienne
Seevorstadt 71
CH-2501 Biel/Bienne
T: +41 32 322 42 45 F: +41 86 032 322 42 45
info@jouph.ch
http://2011.fototage.ch
we
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fr
sa-su
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14h-18h
14h-20h
14-18h
11h-18h
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Seba Kurtis, "Shoe Box", 2008
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EXHIBITION
Seba Kurtis: "Shoe Box", 2008
Seba Kurtis’s "Shoe Box" does not refer to the object itself but rather to its contents: family photos left behind in a shoe box when the family fled Buenos Aires under the pressure of the political and economic crisis; its members were to become illegal immigrants in Spain. Recuperated many years later, the snapshots were damaged, marked by time and stained by water. Highlighting the aesthetic quality of these signs of destruction allows the photographer to create a world rich in meaning, where identity and memory play an important role. The fronts and backs of the photographs draw one’s attention to the pictorial appearance of these abstract markings left by time. The glossy, worn and discoloured paper is speckled with stains that resemble fumaroles emerging from the emulsion.
The photographer uses it to emphasise the instability of the chemical process, which seems to function as a metaphor for memories that erode and change over time. It also evokes the ephemeral nature of the human condition, which the artist experienced intimately during his years as an illegal worker. By reinterpreting his family album, Seba Kurtis is exploring a subject that constantly recurs in contemporary art: a questioning of the form and meaning of archives, memory and representations of the past. The photographer plays on the dual dimension of the language of family photographs: a shared representation of the family memory and a source of historical information. The "Shoe Box" functions as a marker of time, symbolising this biographical rupture, the "before" and the "after", marked by the experience of migration. The composition of the pictures and the scenes they depict appear familiar; they recall our own family albums. Seba Kurtis offers an account of his biography, and the way it is committed to memory ultimately refers us back to our own. (Evelyne Pfeiffer)
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