The Image as The Witness
2018
The Image as the Witness – a solo show by Peter Brandt at Memory of The Future, Paris 19/1 – 12/2 – 2018
The Image as the Witness by the Danish artist Peter Brandt presents a body of work that is an outcome of creative and sociological enquiries at once. After a traumatic aggression in Rome in 2002, Peter Brandt produced a series of works that tend to provide a subjective and sensitive analysis of the concept of Trauma with a certain interest in the link between gender and traumatic experience, such as the question of masculine reaction facing violence.
Peter Brandt’s artistic practice stems from the feminist body art movement of the 1970s, and in particularly from the American art scene, with Hannah Wilke, as the most important reference. It is this encounter with the first feminist art that allows the artist to understand that any experience can be turned into an artistic manifesto. It is also the feminist theories that lead him to analyse the authority aspects in relationships, in public as in a private sphere. His work aims to dialogue with various forms of theoretical thinking, such as the theory of feminism, mentioned above, the studies involving the masculine questions and gender issues, but also those related to the different forms of trauma experiences, with the History of the Arts as a permanent point of references and support. His strong and engaged video and photography performances are offering a sensitive and intimate point of view around the above themes.
Speaking up through the artistic gesture, demonstrates that the arts are powerful forms of expressions, that solicit the awareness of the other, and by so doing allow people to identify, comprehend and share issues of the humanities, as to understand the world, arousing common or universal phenomena such as the question of TRAUMA induced in this exhibition. It is in this respect that the artist presents in analogous to his work the work titled Only the sun was witness; a collection of poems and drawings made by refugees and migrants around their stories, escaping conflicts and disastrous economic situations in their home lands, while searching for a new future, that is also, most often not certain.
In this exhibition Peter Brandt also questions the notion of image. Does the image represent facts, can it attest a reality? Can an image be a reliable witness of story, of the History? If an image can witness, is that an evidence? An image is a reflection of a subjective and intimate point of view, and it solicits at the same time the subjective view of the viewer, then, can an image be a potential vector of change?
Using iconographies, sound or body language, artists use the arts as communication tools to share unique experiences or point of view that can be eventually fully assumed, understood and even shared with others.
Curators: Margalit Berriet and Marie-Cécile Berdaguer
The exposition is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, the L.F. Foghts Foundation, and is under the Label of Arts and Society- UNESCO MOST, CIPSH and IYGU.