Broken Screen
Presented by L’Oeil de la Photographie and inspired by the popular tale “Six blind men and an elephant”, the exhibition encourages the blind, the visually impaired and the sighted to experience photography by keeping all senses alert, contemplating and dialoguing about the nature and limitations of vision. It’s a guide to visiting as a being primarily an experience of discovery.
In Letter on the Blind (French: Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient), Denis Diderot takes on the question of visual perception. According to Diderot’s essay, a blind person who is suddenly able to see for the first time does not immediately understand what he sees, and must spend some amount of time establishing rapports between his experience of forms and distances and the images that were thereafter apparent to him by sight.
Drawing from Diderot’s essay, New-York based artist Javier Téllez’s film Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See is inspired by the famous Indian tale. In the parable, each in a group of blind men touches an elephant and each comes away with a different interpretation of the experience, revealing the fact that no single perspective can be the only truth. Through the film, we learn a bit about each person’s background, their approach to blindness and their ‘tactile recognition’ experience from feeling the elephant. The film Letter on the Blind performs a difficult exercise in attempting to convey a non-visual reality through visual means.
Arising from the same creative impulse, but rather aiming to convey a visual reality through non-visual means, the exhibition “Broken Screen” explore the challenges of visual representation and offer a reflection on the struggle for control over various forms of language and image in our visually driven society.
The exhibition features photographs that are first hidden behind a curtain. A visual description of the image and a tactile print made out of a transformation of the photograph into a drawing (lines by American illustrator Fray DeVore and print by Zychem), help the viewer conceive an image in their mind first, before they look at it. Some audio and written testimonies complement the show, all together responding to Gaia Squarci’s subtly suggestive rather than factual depiction of blindness.
Two pieces by Italian visual artist Andrea Cancellieri are on view to extend the meditation. The first one is a book of illustrations playing on visual expectations, perspective tricks and other pre-conceived representations: a Sphinx appears from just a few lines drawn under a cat face, and a goose swims in an empty swimming pool at an imaginary water level. The other piece is a delicate and poetic take on the failure of perception, taking the shape of a book washed in cement – a book that nobody can open and read despite its intriguingly inviting cover.
Photoville
Broken Screen, de Gaia Squarci
Until September 28, 2014
Pier 5 – Brooklyn Bridge Park
New York
http://www.gaiasquarci.com/#/broken-screen/broken_screen1
http://fraydevore.tumblr.com
http://www.zychem-ltd.co.uk
