Holger Kilumets
Friday, 4 July 2014
Work from Maps and Territories.
“Maps & Territories is an elaborate exploration of the meaning of representation through a series of slightly disparate images, designed to relate to each other through the notion of free association. Borrowing elements from the history of art, photographic practice and advertising imagery, the series attempts to reveal the fragility of the mechanisms that sustain representations and raise questions about photography’s role as a representational device.
Representation, by its very definition, can’t be the thing it represents. Representations don’t merely recreate existing objects or elements of the phenomenal world; they beautify, improve upon, and universalise them. As a result, things get caught up in simulacrum, spectacle and fetish, creating a fictional world, a plastic postmodernity of illusions, appearances and images in which there is no capacity for a non-mediated relationship to reality.
In the contemporary world more and more things first become visible to us via the images we see of them. There is a shift towards the process of the replacement of an object by its image as representations in the form of photographs have become the dominant way through which we perceive and interpret the world around us. Because of this it seems vital to face the fundamental questions about the act of representation, its influence on our perception and understanding of reality and the habitus, modalities and the productive capacity of it.” – Holger Kilumets