Alias

So only a few days now until the opening weekend of Photomonth in Krakow 2011, guest curated by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. I am sure by now you will have seen all the publicity about this years theme, "Alias", if you haven't yet seen what everyone is talking about then here is a little piece from the press release that will surely get you excited and inspired!

"Could it think, the heart would stop beating". Fernando Pessoa

"Twenty-three writers (of fiction, fact and medical history) were each commissioned to create a text describing an invented persona, which was then assigned to a visual artist to inhabit. The work that accompanies these texts is the result of each individual artist’s residency in their fictitious character.

It’s an experiment that was set up to fail, because it shouldn’t be that easy to stop being yourself; to break with your own particular political and ethical concerns. Yet most of the artists we approached bravely took up the challenge.

‘We never disembark from ourselves,’ complained the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet. We wanted to give our contributors the chance to do precisely this: to disembark.

The Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño’s fictional anthology, Nazi Literature in The Americas, showed just how helpful the fictitious persona could be when exploring moral and political territory too terrifying to explore honestly in our own skin." Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, April 2011

Artists and writers include to name but a few, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Polly Braden, Jeremy Deller, Roe Etheridge, Gabriel Orozco, Clare Strand and Gordon MacDonald, Brown & Bri, David Campany, Fernando Pessoa, Ella Saltmarshe, Jennifer Higgie, Sean O’Toole, Helen deWitt, Ivan Vladislavic, Brad Zellar and so many more.

I am heading out on Thursday evening for the opening weekend, so I am busy finalising my plans and travel arrangments, I can't wait it is going to be an amazing trip. I hope to see many people out there too.

http://www.photomonth.com/index.php/en/page/1/aktualnosci.html