Come Meet the Strangers
“Her lover one-day takes O for a walk in a section of the city where they never go - the Montsouris Park. After they have taken a stroll in the park, and have sat together side by side on the edge of a lawn, they notice, at one corner of the park, at an intersection where there are never any taxis, a car which, because of its meter, resembles a taxi.”Get in,” he says.”
Iulia Filipovscaia uses photography to create relationships between performance, painting, and sculpture to investigate the medium within our contemporary technophile society. Come Meet The Strangers breaks down hierarchical notions that surround photography and presents the “documentation” of a performance as a new body of work. This is the artist’s first solo show, an aftermath installation of the ‘O’ Project, which was part of the group show Testing Ground: Live at 176 held earlier this year.
Influenced by Jean Baudrillard’s essay Within the Horizon of the Object (1999), the ‘O’ Project transformed its subjects into objects through the imposed means of silence. Strangers were invited to participate in performative photographic interaction with the artist, within a space that had been purposefully constructed to resemble a photographer’s studio. Inside, Filipovscaia stood with her camera and waited for a stranger to enter and surrender to the voyeuristic experience.
The gaze of the artist and the gaze of the camera eye became a unified encounter towards the participant. It originally intended to uncover individual truth but instead, it brought up ideas of unattainability and the sublime. Come Meet The Strangers will present a selection of photographs of twelve ‘O’ Project participants, installed in a manner that reflects these wider concepts that arose from the performance.
In addition, a new live performance will be staged solely for the opening evening, an aesthetic continuation to the ‘O’ Project that desires to raise further questions around the conceptual marriage between photography and performance.
Both parts of the projects have been curated by Marina Doritis.
