a picture of the world, the world in a picture a picture of the world, the world in a picture

PHOTOMONTH IN KRAKOW 2011

Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

Fernando Pessoa

 

 

Twenty-three writers (of fiction, fact and medical history) were each commissioned to create a text describing an invented persona, which was then assigned to a visual artist to inhabit. The work that accompanies these texts is the result of each individual artist's residency in their fictitious character.  

It's an experiment that was set up to fail, because it shouldn't be that easy to stop being yourself; to break with your own particular political and ethical concerns. Yet most of the artists we approached bravely took up the challenge.

‘We never disembark from ourselves,' complained the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet. We wanted to give our contributors the chance to do precisely this: to disembark. 

The Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño's fictional anthology, Nazi Literature in The Americas, showed just how helpful the fictitious persona could be when exploring moral and political territory too terrifying to explore honestly in our own skin. 

 

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, April 2011

 

P.S. Bob Dylan plays a character called Alias in the film Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, but he doesn't say much. 

 

The list of participating artists includes:

 

            •          Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili and Andro Wekua

            •          Rut Blees Luxemburg

            •          Lisa Brice

            •          Polly Braden

            •          Michael Chanarin

            •          Celine Condorelli

            •          Jeremy Deller

            •          Godfried Donkor

            •          Roe Etheridge

            •          Beatrice Gibson

            •          David Gill

            •          Johan Grimonprez

            •          David Goldblatt

            •          Marine Hugonnier

            •          Rafil Kroll-Zaidi

            •          Elizabeth McAlpine

            •          Gabriel Orozco

            •          Max Pincker

            •          Ella Saltmarshe

            •          Janek Simon

            •          Alec Soth

            •          Clare Strand and Gordon MacDonald

 

 

Collaborating with the writers:

 

            •          Brown & Bri

            •          David Campany

            •          Clare Carolin

            •          Brian Dillon

            •          Alexander Garcia Düttmann

            •          Ekow Eshun

            •          Łukasz Gorczyca i Łukasz Ronduda

            •          Avery Gordon

            •          John Haskell

            •          Jennifer Higgie

            •          Siddhartha Mukherjee

            •          Chris Mullen

            •          Fernando Pessoa

            •          Adrian Rifkin

            •          Gemma Sieff

            •          Karolina Sulej

            •          Lynne Tillman

            •          Sean O'Toole

            •          Helen de Witt

            •          Ivan Vladislavic

         •       Brad Zellar

More: www.photomonth.com