Page 101 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 101
on digital exposures
in the contemporary art, in the same boat. Let me take just a small exam-
ple of the intersection of different semiotic axes, or to be more precise, the
case in which this intersection was simply positioned within an exposito-
ry gesture by artists, who have taken the role of the visitors of the exhibi-
tion. In the particular case they, at the same time, pointed to a decentring
of the colonial gaze and they put a specific and very directly pointed em-
phasis on the notion of double exposure. The case, which I shall briefly re-
port on, is identified by the name of the artistic tandem Shanghai Twins. I
had a personal encounter with this artistic ‘phenomenon’ at the Venice Bi-
ennale of 2007. I met sisters Cara and Celine Zhuang from Shanghai at the
Arsenali exhibition space. At first, I took them to be global visitors or tour-
ists from afresh prospering China. I shot two photographs of them, then I
had a brief chat with the girls, and I promised to e-mail my photos to them.
Only in retrospect was I able to decipher what they were actually telling
to me during our brief chat on the spot, where an artist put an old issue of
Vogue Hommes magazine in an aquarium. Their mission became obvious,
when I got on my e-mail, the zipped portfolio of photos (one of the two I
shot included in it) depicting the twins together with art objects at the Bi-
ennale and the Documenta in Kassel the same year. Their project in the giv-
en case was a work of double exposure on a basic level: two young artists
produced their work of art by ‘inserting’ themselves into the position of
art objects. This gesture, however, became more persuasive by the fact that
they represented an agency of looking back or returning their look to the
colonial gaze. Thanks to the Internet, it was possible to find out that their
subsequent work consisted of exposures, which combine genres of fashion
modelling and performances. Of course, photographic evidence of their
subject/object artistic mix rounds off the exposure. In the same year (2007)
they worked with a renowned fashion photographer Jeremy Stockton John-
son and another photographer Giuseppe Ciaolo in a Yu Wei and Island6
project Twins and Trompe l’oeil.2 Definitely, we have a case in which an ef-
fect, conforming the notion of singularity, was produced by the means of
multiple double exposures. Obviously, the acts of Shanghai Twins retain the
exposing representation only and foremost as a photographic trace; they
are totally immersed in the aesthetic regime of the arts, which “disman-
tled this correlation between subject matter and mode of representation”
(Rancière, 2000: p. 50).
2 Evidence of this project can be found on this internet address: http://www.island6.
org/Twins_info.html (Last accessed on the 17th September 2016).
99
in the contemporary art, in the same boat. Let me take just a small exam-
ple of the intersection of different semiotic axes, or to be more precise, the
case in which this intersection was simply positioned within an exposito-
ry gesture by artists, who have taken the role of the visitors of the exhibi-
tion. In the particular case they, at the same time, pointed to a decentring
of the colonial gaze and they put a specific and very directly pointed em-
phasis on the notion of double exposure. The case, which I shall briefly re-
port on, is identified by the name of the artistic tandem Shanghai Twins. I
had a personal encounter with this artistic ‘phenomenon’ at the Venice Bi-
ennale of 2007. I met sisters Cara and Celine Zhuang from Shanghai at the
Arsenali exhibition space. At first, I took them to be global visitors or tour-
ists from afresh prospering China. I shot two photographs of them, then I
had a brief chat with the girls, and I promised to e-mail my photos to them.
Only in retrospect was I able to decipher what they were actually telling
to me during our brief chat on the spot, where an artist put an old issue of
Vogue Hommes magazine in an aquarium. Their mission became obvious,
when I got on my e-mail, the zipped portfolio of photos (one of the two I
shot included in it) depicting the twins together with art objects at the Bi-
ennale and the Documenta in Kassel the same year. Their project in the giv-
en case was a work of double exposure on a basic level: two young artists
produced their work of art by ‘inserting’ themselves into the position of
art objects. This gesture, however, became more persuasive by the fact that
they represented an agency of looking back or returning their look to the
colonial gaze. Thanks to the Internet, it was possible to find out that their
subsequent work consisted of exposures, which combine genres of fashion
modelling and performances. Of course, photographic evidence of their
subject/object artistic mix rounds off the exposure. In the same year (2007)
they worked with a renowned fashion photographer Jeremy Stockton John-
son and another photographer Giuseppe Ciaolo in a Yu Wei and Island6
project Twins and Trompe l’oeil.2 Definitely, we have a case in which an ef-
fect, conforming the notion of singularity, was produced by the means of
multiple double exposures. Obviously, the acts of Shanghai Twins retain the
exposing representation only and foremost as a photographic trace; they
are totally immersed in the aesthetic regime of the arts, which “disman-
tled this correlation between subject matter and mode of representation”
(Rancière, 2000: p. 50).
2 Evidence of this project can be found on this internet address: http://www.island6.
org/Twins_info.html (Last accessed on the 17th September 2016).
99
