No. 16
Evidentiary Realism
Group show
December 2 - February 17, 2018
OPENING: 2017-12-01 18:00:00
Evidentiary Realism features artists engaged in investigative, forensic, and documentary art. The exhibition aims to articulate a particular form of realism in art that portrays and reveals evidence from complex social systems. The artworks featured explore the notion of evidence and its modes of representation. Evidentiary Realism reflects on post-9/11 geopolitics, increasing economic inequalities, the erosion of civil rights, and environmental disasters. It builds on the renewed appreciation of the exposure of truth in the context of the cases of WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden, the Panama Papers, and the recent efforts to contend with the post-factual era.
Contemporary sharing and processing of information in an open global collaborative environment entails an amplified sense of reality. Leaks, discoveries, and facts are collectively verified and disseminated among numerous distribution networks. Techniques of presentation and engaging the public have been evolving in the same direction: through reconfiguration of media and languages, the evidence is presented in a variety of strategies and artifacts in dialogue with contemporary art practices.
Evidentiary Realism focuses on artworks that prioritize formal aspects of visual language and mediums; diverging from journalism and reportage, they strive to provoke visual pleasure and emotional responses. In the exhibition the evidence is presented through photography, film, drawing, painting, and sculpture, with strong references to art history. In particular, these artists also theoretically articulate the aesthetic, social, and documentary functions of their mediums in relation to the subject matter they investigate.
Some of the evidentiary realist works break down visibility to abstraction to underline the limits of seeing, while others use figuration or synthesis to enhance insight. The encoded information and nuanced details behind the works point to large, highly complex realities that come into focus through the factual evidence shown. Yet these enigmatic and seductive works serve as evidence of the opaque and intricate apparatus of our reality.
The process of translating investigations and documents into artworks underpins the exhibition. Such practices adopted by emerging and established artists of today can be traced to the works of Hans Haacke, Mark Lombardi, and Harun Farocki, who were some of the first artists invested in decoding complex systems of power and conveying them in bold artistic forms. The creation of evidentiary artworks is the realism of today’s world, which is trying to control, predict, and quantify itself. Evidentiary realists examine such complexity to condemn, document, and inform through compelling artworks, giving form to a particular documentary and investigative art practice.
More information on the website EvidentiaryRealism.net
Artists: Sadie Barnette, Josh Begley, James Bridle, Ingrid Burrington, Harun Farocki, Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Hans Haacke, Jenny Holzer, Khaled Hafez, Mark Lombardi, Kirsten Stolle, Thomas Keenan & Eyal Weizman.
Curated by Paolo Cirio.
Photos by Gianmarco Bresadola
Realism is out of sight
The real is present and concrete, yet complexity, scale, speed, and opacity hide it from sight. The contemporary features of the social landscape are unintelligible at first glance. Although we see the shocking results of our social reality, we are nonetheless often unable to see the systems and processes that generate such conditions. Realism in art returns through intersecting documentary, forensic, and investigative practices that contemporary realist artists utilize to bring to light the unseeble beneath the formation of our society.
Realism traditionally portrays social oppression, visually illustrating people and situations truthfully and accurately. In the visual arts, it has primarily been expressed through figurative painting, photography, and film. Thus, realism today can be conceptualized as an expansion of ways of seeing and portraying contemporary social complexities, while maintaining the concern of presenting subject matter factually within the aesthetics of visual language. However, this particular realism looks beyond visible social conditions. Evidentiary Realism examines the underpinning economic, political, legal, linguistic, and cultural structures that impact society at large. These evolving social fields are highly interconnected and often too complex and high-speed to grasp—if not secret, imperceptible, opaque, or manipulated by advanced rhetorical devices. Reality today can only be fully apprehended by pointing at evidence from the language, programs, infrastructures, relations, data, and technology that power structures control, manipulate, and hide. This contemporary postvisual condition is introduced by Trevor Paglen, commenting on the work of Harun Farocki, “wars are being waged through systems that are simply postvisual, or more accurately, systems whose imaging capacities exceed those of human eyes to the point of being invisible to them.”
Since the late sixties, artists have responded to increasingly tangled socio-political and technological developments. Representations of the modern reality of systemic complexity were initially questioned by Jack Burnham and Hans Haacke, who argued, “easel art can no longer convey the subtleties and complexities of the international business world…If you make protest paintings you are likely to stay below the sophistication of the apparatus.”
Inherent limitations of objectivity and the representation of complex social issues were addressed by Martha Rosler as “inadequate descriptive systems” for addressing evidence of intentions and contexts of reception as disguising devices, which Roland Barthes initially discussed as the “overconstruction” of photography. These reflections brought to maturity the documentary category and, as Hal Foster noted recently, “this critique of the document is largely assimilated, and many artists have passed from a posture of deconstruction to one of reconstruction.” The tendency of evidentiary realist artists to show evidence is in effect about the impulse and urgency of reassembling fragments from our entangled and opaque reality and in doing so it reconciles with the original legacy of realism and documentary practices. As Rosalyn Deutsche noted, “today critical practices claiming the legacy of realism [..] explore the mediation of consciousness by representation and investigate the conditions of possibility of what is perceived to be ‘real’ at a given historical moment.”
In turn, the epistemological critique of the document is integrated with an investigation of the factual aspects of the subject matter. Evidentiary Realism considers the contexts of the sociopolitical, technical, and cultural infrastructures of complex systems that influence the perception and validation of truth and reality in an explicit empiricism of epistemic inquiry. The real can be seen only by simultaneously accounting for the multiple infrastructural signals, referents, relations, and processes of the various parameters that produce reality. It’s with Evidentiary Realism that artistic research into systemic and structural apparatuses pushes the boundaries of what can be seen beyond sight.
Paolo Cirio
