I’m in a black box. It’s so dark I can barely see. There are ominous scraping and scratching sounds, the distinctive clinking of metal, the annoying buzzing of insects echoing through a subwoofer. The effect is physical, a kind of reverse ASMR. It sounds like death. And it turns out that’s exactly what I’m listening to.
A sound installation without images is a daring starting point for a photography exhibition. But it also makes sense, because it addresses two of photography’s biggest current problems: absence and apathy. Photography’s continued inability to see, the impossibility of describing everything in visual terms – these have become fascinating topics, and they feature in the exhibitions of all four artists shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography prize This year’s Foundation.
The images you encounter in the black box – an installation by Syrian-born artist Hrair Sarkissian that bears the heavy title Deathscape – are the images you imagine yourself. Sarkissan’s argument is that seeing can never be enough. We must create images through action – feeling before we see, in order to understand. Deathscape is also a document of an action: the excavation of a mass grave in Spain, a citizen-led initiative to recover the bodies of family members who met their fate under Franco’s brutal regime.
Another project by Sarkissian emerges from Deathscape. At first, the spartan images of generic homes – living rooms, kitchens, gardens – all seem eerily empty. After Deathscape you’ll be ready to understand that there’s more to this than meets the eye; these Last Seen (2018-2021) are in fact documents of absence, photographs of the last places where loved ones were seen by their families, before disappearing during conflicts in Argentina, Brazil, Lebanon and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their names and the date of their disappearance are embossed on the image – visible only if you get close. Their whereabouts are still unknown, leaving their relatives in an embarrassing situation. The emptiness of two glasses left on a kitchen table becomes horrifying.
Viennese performer and pioneering feminist artist Valie Export has been nominated for her retrospective The Photographs. Since the show is still on tour, this exhibition has been put together as a mini-survey of Export’s work, drawing on documents from early guerrilla performances such as her Action Pants: Genital Panic, when she paraded through a Munich cinema in a pair of trousers with a triangle on them had been removed at the crotch, after her Body Configurations, in which she literally re-inserts her body into patriarchal structures, lying, squeezing and writhing in the grooves and recesses of buildings that represent authority and power – a kind of urban version from The Earthly Body of Ana Mendieta. There are no live colonoscopies here, although Export once had one for the public. Humor makes it clear that patriarchy was not intended for women or their bodies.
Export is not ‘now’ – most of the work here was made in the 1970s – or, strictly speaking, a photographer. Yet it is easy to see how her influence has been far-reaching, from Marina Abramović (who restaged some of Export’s performances), to Carrie Mae Weems’ Museum Series and Hito Steyerl’s cyborgian feminism. Photography has been an important witness to her wild and radical interventions over the years. And the photos – such as the artist holding out her Valie Export cigarette pack towards the camera – are unforgettable.
Prix Pictet winner Gauri Gill and collaborator Rajesh Vangad have been nominated to co-author a book, Fields of Sight, published last year. Much of Gill’s work is dedicated to telling the stories of – and with – marginalized, peripheral communities across India, challenging traditional documentary photography. This work is a synthesis of her photographs of an Adivasi village on the Maharashta coast, with the graceful imagination of Vangad, a Warli painter – a traditional art form practiced by the indigenous Warli community.
Vangad was initially Gill’s guide, but realizing the impossibility of capturing the complexity and richness of the place, he became her protagonist and collaborator. Her photographs provided a canvas for his intricate geometric motifs, which represented the past, present and future of each place Gill photographed. There are stories of labor, displacement, violence and destruction – things you simply can’t see in one image. Vangad’s painting dances over the photographs and brings them to life. Imagination seems to bring us closer to the truth.
Photography doesn’t have to provide a single point of view. Lebohang Kganye’s work is an attempt to deal with this in a natural climax to the show. The room is filled with Kganye’s sepia-toned, theatrical cutouts, archival and family photographs printed full-size directly onto honeycomb cardboard and mounted on supports. These scenographies represent the history of the Kganye family: her great-grandparents with a herd of cattle; her grandmother, who was expelled from her country during apartheid and became a housekeeper, stands in her kitchen, an iron heater on the stove. A typical township house, with laundry hanging on the line, materializes memories from a family photo album. As you contemplate these theatrical scenes, the light above your head shifts, casting shadows where images stand. Kganye is also concerned about absences. These cutouts are silhouettes for lives lived and love lost, reminding us that photographs can never be a stand-in for life or love.
The Deutsche Börse – the Turner Prize of the photography world – can only be as good as the art shown in the past year (artists and photographers are nominated by an international jury of experts based on exhibitions or books that have taken place in Europe in the previous twelve months). This year’s cohort comes together with surprising clarity in a summative study that is in sync with the cataclysmic world beyond.
• The Deutsche Börse Prize Exhibition runs from February 23 to June 2 at the Photographers’ Gallery, London.