Some works and their afterlife

Mika Elo

In this exposition I present a cluster of works with regard to their subtle interconnections, often not consciously constructed or intended in any particular ways at the time of their conception. The afterlife of these works, however, enact aesthetic intra-actions of their ensemble. Shedding light on some parts of this cavernous network of pressing matters I make an attempt of explicating the ways in which artistic thinking might get "diffracted" into many part-processes that are both divergent and entangled. In the course of my presentation, I try to be sensitive towards the fact that these strings of thinking are distributed in a complex manner across the divide of sensibility and intelligibility. In terms of the chosen approach this implies avoiding the use of discursive explanations as the main medium of explication. This "method", if it can be formalized as one, involves priorizing the material circumstances of particular articulations, both verbal and non-verbal, over content-oriented gestures of translation.

Singing Lessons for Photography

(2006– )

How to lay bare the parameters of the photographic space? How to present its technical determinants, its relation to gravity and scale, surface and depth, lived dimensions of time and space? How to invite the viewer to reading the spatio-temporal reconfiguration taking place in a photograph? Singing Lessons for Photography is an attempt to articulate these questions in visual terms. Referring to Barad, we could say that the work is a kind of notation arrangement that enacts "agential cuts" in the photographic space and highlights certain aspects of it (at the cost of others). Its title refers to a process involving various forms of translation aiming at intensification of the language of photography up to the point where it is released from the burden of signification up to a point that allows it to resonate itself.*

In 2007 the project led also to a media theoretical essay "The Language of Photography as a Translation Task" that relates Walter Benjamin's language philosophy and theory of translation to photography and artistic research (pdf here on the right).

The photography installation Choir (2011) takes up the theme of photographic space again and presents a photographically recorded spatio-temporal event laid out in a planar grid-like constellation.

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