SITUATIONS/Fact
Emile Barret, David Fathi, Sara-Lena Maierhofer, Myriam Ziehli
June 13–18, 2017
Fotomuseum Winterthur
www.fotomuseum.ch

LISTE Burgweg 15, 4058 Basel Switzerland

To investigate what photography is becoming, Fotomuseum launched its new format SITUATIONS—a dynamic program that responds to current developments within photographic culture and experiments with innovative interactions of physical and digital spaces. As a research lab, SITUATIONS examines photographic processes in a wide visual and cultural context, challenging our understanding of photography. Numbered consecutively, SITUATIONS are curated and presented as thematic clusters five times per year at Fotomuseum and beyond.

At LISTE, Fotomuseum expands its current cluster SITUATIONS/Fact from the museum walls. The show focuses on the ideas of truth and representation in the age of alternative facts, investigating photography’s crucial role as a medium whose indexical quality and visual accuracy have been closely linked to claims of objectivity and truth throughout its history. Moving from propaganda to photo forensics, from photo journalism to fake news, and from scientific evidence to censorship, the cluster will articulate different positions showing the complex role of the photographic image within this discourse.

Infiltrating the print workshop of the Warteck-Areal, this extension of SITUATIONS/Fact will see artist Emile Barret (*1989) with his collective MusicforEggplant creating a site-specific mixed media environment that addresses the notion of conspiracy theories. Inspired by the recent online #FreeTheEggplant reaction to instagram’s ban on the eggplant emoji searches, the artists will create myths, symbologies, rumours and alternative narratives around the newly acquired mystery of the eggplant image. Working from the tradition of the printing space—once the epicentre of propaganda and visual communication—the artist collective will transform the space through an intervention that will employ the photographic image in its widest forms—from prints on fabrics and sheets to wall projections.

Further presentations include spatial translations and extensions of artistic photo books by David Fathi (Anecdotal, 2015), Sara-Lena Maierhofer (Dear Clark, Study of a Con Man, 2011/2016) and Myriam Ziehli (La Montagne Dorée, 2012/2017). Investigative in nature and revolving around issues of conspiracies, make-believe, and truth, their works productively question photography’s ambivalent status between fact and fiction.