Azar Alsharif & Pedro Henriques at Syntax

Artists: Azar Alsharif & Pedro Henriques

Exhibition title: Golden Grain

Curated by: Markéta Stará Condeixa

Venue: Syntax, Lisbon, Portugal

Date: July 7 – September 23, 2017

Photography: Bruno Lopes, images copyright and courtesy the artists and Syntax, Lisbon

We find ourselves ingrained in a realm of abstracted representations. A tangible reality as we once knew it, has been rendered obsolete. It has shifted towards a virtual comprehension of our surrounding; it has been altered into a landscape, which has been gradually virtualised and post produced into supposedly real images of who we are and what we might, or already have
become. The world’s surface has been covered by layers of such images − flickering, illuminated and continuously circulating similes that now appear to be the world’s exterior coat. Reality was lost in the digital and the Djd archive of its past, as has the idea of the authentic image, object or the remix of a true self. Contemporary representations of the real today, are representations of the equally non-real archival families of older and the already post produced depictions of initial objects/subjects, fabricated from the many times appropriated and the virtual, the reality of which, is now no longer at stake. “The tools of postproduction here are not made at achieving a representation of reality. They have become means of creating images and a world in their wake.” *

Deep under the surface these images however still exist. Although archaic in form and in the singularity of their content, they now only endure as preconditions for their later becoming and transfigurations. Some have become new representations or backdrops, others have become victims of their own reconfiguration and translation, resulting in new hybridised settings or into three dimensional materialisations. It might feel dated. After all it is an exhibition of images, of representations and of small realities, the misplacement, replacement and transformation of which however, serves us as a tool, allowing us to question contemporary principles of representation, the abstraction of appearance and the speed of disappearance.

-Markéta Stará Condeixa

* Hito Steyerl, Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?, e-flux journal -The Internet Does Not Exist, p.19, Sternberg Press, 2015