In Déjà Vu? Susan Bright reflects on the identity of photography and its evolution over the course of history

The British writer and curator Susan Bright has designed Déjà vu?, a programme composed of five individual exhibitions that reflect on the identity of photography and the evolution of its meaning over the course of history. The artists invited to participate in the programme are Elina Brotherus, Clare Strand, Laura Letinsky, Sharon Core, Patrick Pound and Délio Jasse. ‘In all of the presented works, you can sense a fundamental change in the way photography functions, from the original concept through to its public display in this day and age. The programme’s contemporary works explore this metamorphosis and deal with the function, identity and role of the medium itself. In the selection there is a return to the historical relationship that photography has with painting, and a shift in the way that certain photographs were once considered but are now cast anew. Each artist grapples with photography to question its limits, its function, its expectations, its history and its legacy’, states Bright.

Fernán Gómez. Centro Cultural de la Villa will host three of the individual exhibitions that comprise Déjà vu? Elina Brotherus will present Playground with work inspired by the Fluxus movement. The artist poses questions related to art, the role of history, authorship, repetition and performance in a project created between 2016 and 2018 that includes 60 photographs and 30 videos. Brotherus creates a series of performances serving as a set of pictures that interrelate with one another and are reflected in their own historical references. Clare Strand will present The Discrete Channel with Noise, a group of works that examine what happens when information is misleading, misunderstood or misinterpreted. In the case of Strand, this loss of information occurs when she applies the experiment to her own work, whereby a medium—in this case, photography—is transformed into another one: painting. The result is a poignant manifestation of collaboration and communication with faults, fortitude and misunderstandings evident from the paint marks on paper. Furthermore, in O outro capítulo the Angolan photographer Délio Jasse reconstructs the socio-political history of the Portuguese colonies through the lost photographs and archives of two families. His work is a reflection on domestic spaces and everyday acts and the paradoxes in which they are enshrouded in certain contexts. Jasse presents the series Lost Chapter Nampula-1963 and Nova Lisboa based on a collection of slides that, together with other personal objects, were in a drawer that the artist found at a market in Lisbon. Jasse checked official documents, examined several photographic studies and printed out the photographs in order to investigate and discover the identity and whereabouts of the families.