Olhares transversos: photography and photographers
Edgard Oliva
Olhares transversos aims at allowing perceptions and doings to intersect, dialogue, find new meanings, raise questions. It becomes necessary for the potential of our local production, diverse and still obscure in face of a timid modernity, but which blooms from the restlessness of the ateliers and multiple experimentations of distinct visions. This exhibition gathers works by Adelmo Santos, Edgard Oliva – photographer-curator -, Eriel Araújo, Gil Maciel, Karla Brunet, Patrícia Martins, Péricles Mendes, Renata Voss, Rodrigo Wanderley, Rosa Bunchaft, and, Tom Correia, whose images can give us the dimension of our current creative capacity, contemporary within the measure of the word. For this purpose, some artistic photographers were reunited, some still emergent and others known to the public and critic, some awarded ones.
The images lead us to raise questions and reflect about our agonizing society. They are images whose constructions demand investigations articulated with the body, with the city and with rereading of multifaceted landscapes, of internal landscapes that are reflected on the external landscapes, of landscapes that are essential to our planetary organism, image bodies as landscapes for dreams. What is, then, the contemporary, according to these views?
Proposing a dialogue, in the contemporary art scope, between photography and other artistic languages causes vehicular dissonances under singular readings. Hence the question: have we reached the contemporary or contemporary is what we live, produce, think that continues in expansion and whose best part we select so that it becomes more visible and critical? Or still, we feed ourselves with a “contemporary” germinated in the past, of a photographic and documental management that Bahia produces under different visions, and that becomes the starting point of new perceptions? Agamben’s question “What is contemporary?” we wouldn’t know how to answer, but we suspect that it pulses between the new, the unseen, what emerges from the inside out of the thinking being for a new critical and limiting vision in face of our eye, of our being in…immersion state? Maybe it is hidden in what is inside us, in the moments lived, in the cultivated history which we help to build with new visual dialogues. It’s also feeling.
They are love, anguish, joy, accusations, frustrations, internal structures that we form from the poetic to the imagination; from the experienced visuality and materiality. I would also say that the word is an image and an image builds words; a poem. A photo is image and poetry. As current language, the expanded image is worked on, not only the captured image, but organized image, thought image, sewn, reflected, upon which the diversity of visions and new experimentations affirm themselves.
The artist photographers of this exhibition are creators of visualities aimed at the Photographic, at the emergency of the facts, of the time that provides transversality, aesthetic doings and modalities with questions from the thinking body about the present/absent time that pulses, and disturbs us.
Edgard Oliva, Visual artist and curator - March 2019