Image: Annalisa Sonzogni
Four Corners is pleased to host Bridging the Distance, a group exhibition by the Ph Research Network
BRIDGING THE DISTANCE
23 June - 03 July | 11am - 6.30pm
Private view | 23 June 6 - 8pm
ARTISTS
Andreia Alves de Oliveira
Estéfani Bouza
Liz J Drew
Paula Gortázar
Alexandra Hughes
Sukey Parnell Johnson
Uschi Klein
Caroline Molloy
Annalisa Sonzogni
Lauren Winsor
CURATOR
Gil Pasternak
A group exhibition by international photography, moving image, and lens-related artists, Bridging the Distance re-evaluates photography’s ability to draw us close to the feelings, concerns, and lived experiences of those who exist beyond our own immediate physical, political, and cultural spaces.
The works in the exhibition consider people, groups, and places of various national and social backgrounds, all of which have seen major transformations of local and even historic significance in the recent past. Whether sending us from England to former Czechoslovakia, Russia, Spain, or back to England again, their varied communicative approaches invite us to ask how do we – how must we – understand the connection between photography and people’s ways of life in today’s post-factual world.
Relentlessly compelling us to take a reality check, the artists often use the camera together with other media, such as voice, sound, text, writing, clay, and found ephemera. These actions collapse traditional divisions of theory and practice, speculation and perceived knowledge, imagination and experience. The works thereby encourage us to engage with the question of photography’s participation in human affairs – intellectually, empirically, and emotionally.
Some of the exhibits prompt renewed consideration of photographic images; others revolve around the implications of photography’s material manifestations. Fantasy, social perception, seclusion, surveillance, and the everyday are themes that run throughout Bridging the Distance, enabling us to revisit our understandings of photography’s relationship to vision, visibility, and visualisation in different yet familiar contexts.
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated to all of us how much we are dependent on one another for our mutual protection and safety. Considering the global rise of various forms of physical, political, and cultural exclusion that characterize life in the present day nevertheless, Bridging the Distance implores us to contemplate how photography may be used to neutralise dogmatic cynicism and establish non-discriminatory connections between people across ideological and actual boundaries alike.
The exhibition Bridging the Distance has received funding from the Institute of Art and Design at De Montfort University Leicester.