This project was presented in Athens at BIOS (2005). Music of K. Bhta was originally composed for the performance.
The following text is written by famous art critic Edward Lucie Smith:
The photographs of Petros Birbilis depict a strange private world, in which everyday objects acquire an unexpected and often faintly sinister importance. The images are sometimes presented in pairs, or assembled into storyboard sequences. These pairings and sequences imply an underlying narrative, which is sometimes clear but which sometimes remains cryptic. It is easy to understand, for example, what is implied by a picture of two women, linked to an image of a framed photograph with a lamp burning in front of it. The montage borrows from film, and in particular from the techniques of juxtaposition pioneered by the great Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. The two women, we immediately understand, are in mourning for the family member - a husband and/or father - represented in the framed photograph.
Similarly, an image with a foggy road paired with one showing a wrecked car seems to speak of cause and effect.
Much more mysterious is a close up of the handle of an electric kettle, with kitchen tiling in the background that is paired with one of the plug and the on-and-off switch of what seems to be the same kettle.
Birbilis looks at things like these with an alienated gaze that makes the result seem very personal and distinctive. One gets the feeling that these are attempts to make sense of a world that has suddenly lost meaning - where things that are familiar and ought to make sense have suddenly ceased to do so,
Many of us have had fleeting experiences of this sort - on being suddenly awakened from a deep sleep, for example; or when being interrupted in the midst of reading an absorbing book. In those circumstances what we see suddenly seems disconnected from the whole process through which the brain recognises familiar objects.
Photographs are often thought of as being straightforward representations of things that exist in what we are pleased to call "the real world". This aspect is reinforced by the fact that photographs and photo-derived representations [images in advertisements or on billboards for instance] step outside the realm of art, in the way that language, in most of the ways we use it, steps outside the realm of literature.
Here all these assumptions are challenged. The pictures are not about what the photographer sees, in the everyday sense of the verb "to see'. They are about his relationship, or, very often, his lack of relationship, to the process of apprehending the world through the sense of sight.
As such, they are vivid representations of emotional states.
They also have fascinating things to tell us about the true nature of photography - about the way in which, for instance, it often shows us an incomplete or severely cropped image as a way of forcing us into an emotional relationship with some larger whole. The process is reinforced here by the use of pairings and sequences that bring the result close to film. A photograph is not in fact a representation of something. It is only a representation of the way that light happens to fall on something at a particular moment. Birbilis' images are particularly adept in capturing and emphasising the ephemeral nature of the medium, which is one of the things that distinguishes it from painting.
This project was presented in Athens at BIOS (2005). Music of K. Bhta was originally composed for the performance.
ReplyDeleteThe following text is written by famous art critic Edward Lucie Smith:
The photographs of Petros Birbilis depict a strange private world, in which everyday objects acquire an unexpected and often faintly sinister importance. The images are sometimes presented in pairs, or assembled into storyboard sequences. These pairings and sequences imply an underlying narrative, which is sometimes clear but which sometimes remains cryptic. It is easy to understand, for example, what is implied by a picture of two women, linked to an image of a framed photograph with a lamp burning in front of it. The montage borrows from film, and in particular from the techniques of juxtaposition pioneered by the great Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. The two women, we immediately understand, are in mourning for the family member - a husband and/or father - represented in the framed photograph.
Similarly, an image with a foggy road paired with one showing a wrecked car seems to speak of cause and effect.
Much more mysterious is a close up of the handle of an electric kettle, with kitchen tiling in the background that is paired with one of the plug and the on-and-off switch of what seems to be the same kettle.
Birbilis looks at things like these with an alienated gaze that makes the result seem very personal and distinctive. One gets the feeling that these are attempts to make sense of a world that has suddenly lost meaning - where things that are familiar and ought to make sense have suddenly ceased to do so,
Many of us have had fleeting experiences of this sort - on being suddenly awakened from a deep sleep, for example; or when being interrupted in the midst of reading an absorbing book. In those circumstances what we see suddenly seems disconnected from the whole process through which the brain recognises familiar objects.
Photographs are often thought of as being straightforward representations of things that exist in what we are pleased to call "the real world". This aspect is reinforced by the fact that photographs and photo-derived representations [images in advertisements or on billboards for instance] step outside the realm of art, in the way that language, in most of the ways we use it, steps outside the realm of literature.
Here all these assumptions are challenged. The pictures are not about what the photographer sees, in the everyday sense of the verb "to see'. They are about his relationship, or, very often, his lack of relationship, to the process of apprehending the world through the sense of sight.
As such, they are vivid representations of emotional states.
They also have fascinating things to tell us about the true nature of photography - about the way in which, for instance, it often shows us an incomplete or severely cropped image as a way of forcing us into an emotional relationship with some larger whole. The process is reinforced here by the use of pairings and sequences that bring the result close to film. A photograph is not in fact a representation of something. It is only a representation of the way that light happens to fall on something at a particular moment. Birbilis' images are particularly adept in capturing and emphasising the ephemeral nature of the medium, which is one of the things that distinguishes it from painting.
Edward - Lucie Smith