Harkawik is delighted to announce Photos on Fridges, the widely anticipated follow-up to our 2022 Works on Paper on Fridges, and our final exhibition to employ household appliances as pedestals. The refrigerator occupies a peculiar position in modern life—simultaneously indispensable and invisible, a humming presence we notice almost exclusively when it breaks down. By introducing these appliances into the gallery as apparatus of display, the space of aesthetic contemplation is superimposed onto ordinary life—each made visible through the other, neither fully stable—the white cube and the home flickering in and out of legibility. The refrigerator disrupts the gallery’s fiction of neutrality, but only long enough to notice some of traditional photography’s closely-held rules.
This domestic frame draws a focus around portraiture, the quotidian, and artists who turn their cameras on what is nearest: their own homes, bodies, and the intimate textures of their lives.
Portraiture anchors the show as a site where personal and collective histories converge, bringing together artists who implicate themselves in their work—whether by appearing as interlocutor, photographing collaborators and family, or foregrounding the apparatus of production itself. Several turn their own bodies into sites of transgression, enacting or refusing what photography typically demands of its subjects—legibility, compliance, the performed availability of the self. Others take this inquiry further, demonstrating photography’s cannibalization of context, its unique propensity to reabsorb and instrumentalize, to flatten radical gesture into style. Many deliberately borrow tropes from fashion, documentary, and vernacular photography only to unravel them, producing images that oscillate between candid documentation and staged self-consciousness. By framing the appropriation of visual languages as a form of readymade, the exhibition situates contemporary meta-photography within a lineage of interventions that have both shaped the medium’s development and unsettled its claims to truth, identity, and representation.
The fridge door makes no distinction between the significant and the ordinary; here, masterworks hang alongside snapshots, ephemera, vernacular and anonymous pictures. Photos on Fridges traces the constructed image from the birth of the medium to the present moment, when photography has become an almost automatic daily activity—and proposes that the ocean of images we now encounter daily, a product of the destabilization of the medium’s traditional tenets, might not usher along the death of the chemical photo but represent its apotheosis. Perhaps the humble domestic surface is the place where both can land, be held, and be seen again. While nearly all works employ photographic processes, the inquiry is broader: how artists define the self through the other, and how the portrait—contested, nuanced, endlessly re-negotiated—remains one of visual art’s most enduring subjects.
