James Bantone at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève

Artist: James Bantone

Exhibition title: Bourse de la Ville de Genève 2022

Venue: Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva, Switzerland

Date: September 2 – October 2, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève

The artistic practice of James Bantone constitutes an ongoing exploration and disturbing look at the identity obsession. Through his interest in the genre of “horror”, Bantone pushes the simple intimate human emotions into an absurdist twist by reconfigurating bodies and objects with the help of prosthetics or creating new ones from various materials and stitches. This process grants him to relax the “vigorous but pervious, violent but uncertain” tension between the aberrant other and the phobic I through the invocation of humour and refusal, and as such, addressing the paradox of representational politics. From distorting reality and breaking taboos, or just eliciting emotions, Bantone uses horror to experience existence at its most frightening and in doing so breaking us open to a revelatory spiral, which focuses between dehumanization and body as commodity fetishism. With the help of installations which toy with the poetics of anonymity, ulterior perspective(s), and subjectivity, Bantone questions contemporary markers of violence in a geography of Whiteness.

The physical imposition of the viewer within the space as opposed to looking at the space depicted in a photograph builds up the feeling of uncanniness perceived in Bantone’s installations. Thus giving the impression of being on the set of a fashion shoot, seeing the bizarre scene before it’s been imaged through the camera then further manipulated. While the creation of such highly stylised and stylish images by the artist is not solely owed to the rendering of fashion photography ‘s logistics, but by appropriating the “tools” of fashion and sometimes, perverting their application, Bantone approaches a new method of representation shrouded with layers of refusal – tightly-stitched neoprene suits which reveal no skin, nor face; the imposition of grotesque, oversized prosthetics/ attributes, other times the removal of any other features that would no longer grants one’s body to count as merely mortal . Plainly, Bantone is refusing the identification of your subjects and thereby refusing their exploitation.