The narrow relations between photography and sculpture gave birth to a series, "Séma Chéein". In preparation for it I spent one month photographing and conducting an archival research in the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul in 2011. The work considers the spectral nature of photography intermingled with the space of the museum. In it I focused in photographing sculpture and exploring the new spaces outstretched by the encounter between the power of the photographic simulacrum and the technics and territories of sculpture.
Both photography and sculpture refer by nature to reproduction. From one sculpture and one photo we can make multiples. But beyond the proximity of vocabulary between these two arts (multiple, modulation of light, polarity negative/positive, fractured space, crop, focus, spectator's variable point of view, lighting, montage and assemblage), photographing sculpture is also the enhance of a discourse about the image to a new potency as well a transformative power that drives me to a new subjectivity. My work is implicated in intersections, convergences and dissonances between photography and sculpture, in a compulsion to repeat, to reduplicate the melancholic tone of the marbles in images that are no longer something immobile, encouraging both aesthetic and cognitive processes of response and trying to see new angles; an imaginary engagement with the past, present and multiple, beyond any art museification. I'm not looking for passive spectatorship but to take on responsibility for the act of perception and confront myself with the limits of photography.
There is an infinity of latent images surrounding us, due to the fact that in all objects there's this latency, an impregnation which photography holds, something errant or nomad that brings a different time and blurs our frontiers. There are always spectres whenever latent images of the objects come and disturb our sensations. The spectral nature of photography suspends the world between copy and original, perception and imagination, between reality and fiction. In my perception of the world there is a coexistence of different times, like an errant phantom in my own vision to which my photographic work is particularly attentive. For me, this disturbance happens in the museological space.
All the fragments enclosed in the museums continue to stroll through manbs generations. These big assemblies are literally populations of bodies and faces from another time, waiting their hour to appear. At times we feel them close to us, their radiance requires us to pause for a moment. As I walk in front of the sculptures they began to light up in the imagination, sending signals to each other and affecting me with their randomness, sometimes producing the right sounds. In a way, the work I propose tries to document and expose a certain gesture, a certain movement: a condensed formB of time.
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Bruno Dias Vieira, born in 1975, in Leiria, Portugal. Living and working in Lisbon. Graduate Studies in Painting with a specialization in Drawing and Photography at the FBAUL, University of Lisbon.
I'm a painter that in the recent years developed an intense practice and exchange between painting, photography, sculpture and drawing. My approach has always as subject the nature and the hidden possibilities of the medium and the discovery of a 'distant proximity' between those arts was an inherent necessity of the work. Something of the photographic was already within the painting; something in photography prepared the coming of drawing and sculpture.