Emmanuel Rodriguez-Chaves

Anathema: Kicking A Dead Horse is my first curatorial endeavour. Even though I see it more like organising a show with a group of people I like and whose work I relate to, I am not a curator. Their work, in my opinion, seeks aspects of the image that are mysterious and not easy to translate into words. Coming from an image-based pictorial background, I find my work asking similar questions and within the same struggle when it comes to translating these visual problematics into words. Especially today in a world full of dogmatisms, where the holders of the so-called truth come riding from many sides, I believe we need the Naivität of art. But let's not confuse naivety with irresponsibility. 

In his book, Anthropology of Images, Hans Belting says '[an] "image" is more than a product of perception. It is created as the result of personal or collective knowledge and intention. We live with images, we comprehend the world in images. And this living repertory of our internal images connects with the physical production of external pictures that we stage in the social realm.' Recently, I have started to think that intellectually, as a society, we are approaching an era in which images and the processes to read them are soon to become redundant. That is why I believe we need new approaches and perspectives to interpret the image-production that it's being led today. Or, perhaps use art as a platform to test these new ideas and interrelations. 

For Anathema: Kicking A Dead Horse, I established a conversation with(in) artists who deal with images in a promiscuous manner. I used a text by Vilém Flusser called To Scatter, from the book Into the Universe of Technical Images, where Flusser's ideas serve as a kind of harbinger of our current time. He proposes that instead of focussing in how old modes of understanding images and modes of communication are disappearing or shifting, we should focus on how to deal with the new ones and create strategies to understand these. The text served as motivation and provocation to me and the artists. From video-collage to painting that uses found and re-created sources; from the illusion of images that speak of themselves to videos that reenact events that changed the course of our temporalities. Some works employ cryptic mechanisms of displaying, testing the viewer's gaze and questioning the boundaries of image and text and how these modify each other's interpretations. Through these, the show explores the potentialities of the image today.

All the documentation by Aaron Christopher Rees http://aaronchristopherre.es/

Sanja Pahoki is represented by Sarah Scout Presents https://www.sarahscoutpresents.com/web/sanja-pahoki/