Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined

Impressions Gallery, Bradford

Exhibition review by Anneka French

Co-curated by Impressions Gallery and Peckham 24, Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined features works by eight photographers who reframe official and personal archives to explore the abuses of organised religion and colonialism. As Anneka French writes, the exhibition’s diversity of influences underscores the role and value of the archive and, more crucially, the importance of radical approaches towards its reuse and interrogation.


Anneka French | Exhibition review | 1 August 2024

A statue of the Virgin Mary repeated across two photographs is a potent signifier of the power structures and abuses that inform and then I ran (2023). This suite of photographs, in which experiences of Emi O’Connell’s grandmother are re-enacted, is hung formally, with a central diptych of a blurred, brooding landscape flanked by figures in this same location. Described as ‘performative self-portraiture’, O’Connell re-tells parts of her grandmother’s story of escape from an Irish Catholic mother and baby home – often referred to as the Magdalene Laundries, institutions in which the devastating treatment of those confined is still coming to light – when she climbed from a window aged 16 and heavily pregnant with O’Connell’s father, who was subsequently forcefully adopted. O’Connell can be seen tenderly holding a sprig of cow parsley in one photograph. She can further be seen running, falling and twisting, her head bent and body crouched in distress, in images that are as strangely still, sensitive and beautiful as they are full of trauma.

The visible shutter release cable in O’Connell’s photographs is evidence of the reconstruction taking place and indeed, and then I ran embodies many of the core subjects presented in the wide-ranging and complex group exhibition Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined at Impressions Gallery, Bradford. The exhibition asks questions about the impacts of ‘official’ archives, be these institutional or familial, on (but not limited to) communities, bodies, memories and identities. Eight photographers here disrupt, re-make, re-present or reinterpret these narratives, finding meaning of their own and revealing new ways of looking at difficult things.

As with O’Connell’s photographs, the unfathomable impacts of and abuses by organised religion also occupy key roles in works by Alba Zari and Jermaine Francis. Zari’s Occult (2019-23) offers a partial picture of her own mother and grandmother’s life as members of a Christian fundamentalist sect now titled The Family International, in India, Nepal and Thailand. This is revealed through archival photographs, and comic strip-like drawings and text that highlight ways the sect drew in recruits through practices of sexual exploitation very much at odds with the smiling family photographs that Zari has layered on top of and tacked-up alongside these.

Francis’ Once Upon a Time: a bible, multiple protagonists and the propagation of gospel in racial time (2024-ongoing) is shown in and on vitrines arranged in the shape of a cross. The work itself is focused upon Anglian Church archives held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, pertaining to historic missionary initiatives in the Caribbean. Underscoring the abuses of black people under colonialism and its continuing reverberations, Francis’ work, elements of which are placed beneath magnifying sheets, and including grey archive boxes, bibles and layered prints made up of collaged archival imagery and text, asks viewers to lean over, look closely and implicate themselves within the work and its contexts.

Also working with found archival imagery, Amin Yousefi’s Eyes Dazzle as They Search for the Truth (2022) uses protest photographs from the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79 in Iran. Specifically searching out people from the crowd who look (or seem to look) directly at the camera, these isolated individuals form a newly reassembled archive of gazes photographed through a loupe. Extracting individual people from the crowd, the work presented features a cluster of small prints alongside one very large photograph that centres the wary face of a young child, pinpointing his smallness and his humanity among the protesting throng.

Woman Wearing Ring Shields Face from Flash (2019-23) by Odette England is comprised of a large paste-up and a series of glossy prints. On the left, the photographs are of male photographers, prominent camera lenses and flashbulbs standing in place of eyes as their cameras obscure their faces. On the right are photographs of women refusing to be photographed, their hands in front of their faces and heads turned away. England’s work flags the potential abuses of photography itself – how it takes, snaps, shoots and captures through the violence of vocabulary hidden in plain sight – and of the subject’s own limited power in this dynamic. England’s work assembles vernacular images, forming a new archive of resistance that speaks to contemporary feminist dialogue and ongoing challenges to patriarchal perspectives that seek to control women in body and in image.

Eleonora Agostini’s and Tarrah Krajnak’s works touch upon further feminist concerns in connection with personal identity. While Agostini’s collection of photographs A Study on Waitressing (2020-24) pays homage to her waitress mother, her sore feet and the dual performances of in/visibility necessary to her role, Krajnak’s SISMOS79 (2014) explores her identity as an Indigenous transracial person who has experienced adoption and generational trauma. Composed of five large prints, Krajnak’s work combines broken mirrors photographed in conjunction with political and pornographic magazine pages from the year of her birth, offering a highly fragmentary personal and social perspective of this window in time.

Of all the eight photographers featured, Laura Chen’s work sits rather differently. Employing a dark sense of humour, Being Framed (2022) uses the rudimentary tropes of old-fashioned, analogue criminal investigations by police or private detectives popularised in film noir to develop a fictional case lead by avatar DCI Dean Wilson. Newspaper clippings, mocked-up case files, crime scene tape and a missing rabbit poster feature in Chen’s new archive. An image of a CCTV camera is positioned high up on the wall, while a footprint is playfully glued to the floor. Since Being Framed overtly refers to imagined or fictional events, it lacks the emotional and psychological force of other works on display.

The exhibition, which draws upon multiple international contexts and inputs, is co-curated by Impressions Gallery and Peckham 24, where it showed along with other projects and exhibitions in southeast London earlier this year. In Bradford, the exhibition’s diversity of influence, approach and subject makes for a challenging and, at times, uneven viewing experience but nonetheless it is one that serves as a useful reminder of the importance of the archive and, more crucially, of the importance of radical approaches towards it. ♦

Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined runs at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, until 31 August


Anneka French is a Curator at Coventry Biennial and Project Editor for Anomie, an international publishing house for the arts. She contributes to Art QuarterlyBurlington Contemporary and Photomonitor, and has written and had editorial commissions from Turner Prize, Fire Station Artists’ Studios, TACO!, Grain Projects and Photoworks+. French served as Co-ordinator and then Director at New Art West Midlands, Editorial Manager at this is tomorrow and has worked at galleries including Tate Modern, London, and Ikon, Birmingham.

Images:

1-Untitled from Occult, 2019-23. © Alba Zari

2-Untitled from A Study in Waitressing, 2020-24. © Eleonora Agostini

3-Emi O’Connell, and then I ran, 2023. 

4-Untitled from Once Upon a Time: a bible, multiple protagonists and the propagation of gospel in racial time, 2024-ongoing. © Jermaine Francis 

5-Untitled, from the series Eyes Dazzle as they Search for The Truth, 2022. © Amin Yousefi


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Lisa Sorgini

Behind Glass

Essay by Catlin Langford

Currently on display at Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) in Melbourne/Naarm, Lisa Sorgini’s Behind Glass is a pandemic project comprising family portraits marked by art historical readings and an attempt to provoke discussion on the lack of awareness surrounding the relationships between children and mothers, as well as a wider misunderstanding concerning the messy realities of mothering and care, argues Catlin Langford.


A woman is seated, knees jutting forward. Her flesh compresses on the seat, a small, hollow dimple appearing on her left leg. Her face is obscured; hidden behind the naked baby she holds upwards, the child’s small foot skimming her upper thigh, and a hazy image of a cloudy blue sky and distant palm trees which falls across the woman’s face.

This layered imagery signals the driving concept informing Lisa Sorgini’s Behind Glass, a project comprising over 20 portraits of family groupings. Each work in the series was photographed through windows, or rather “behind glass”. The images reflected in the window glass become further characters in the portraits. It is multi-functional, serving as both a distinct aesthetic device, producing layered, painterly images, but also drawing attention to the unique circumstances under which the series was produced.

Behind Glass was conceived during the pandemic. Whilst social structures were significantly altered in this period of upheaval, mothers still found themselves undertaking most of the caring duties and were shouldered with even further responsibilities when other systems, like schooling, were not in place. Sorgini, at home with her two children and unable to work, responded to this personally and sought to document and reflect on the strange culture of parenting and care during the pandemic.

Created during the pandemic, Behind Glass was also held back by the pandemic. Its current showing at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) in Melbourne/Naarm is the first exhibition of the series in Australia. The images speak to both the collective and individual experience of the pandemic and undoubtedly resonate with the Melbourne population who were witness to a widely publicised ‘world’s longest lockdown’.[1] Sorgini is based in Bundjalung Country, in northern New South Wales. Like most of Australia, at some point this area was under stay-at-home orders, movement restricted to a five-kilometre radius. Complying with these rules, Sorgini sourced subjects within this perimeter via friends, neighbours or connections through contacts and social media. At their homes, she would direct her subjects via telephone or speaking through the glass, her six-month-old son sometimes strapped to her body as she photographed.

There is a naturalness to the photographs that one would not assume based on the circumstances of their creation and reveals Sorgini inherent understanding of her subjects. But there is also a theatricality, the works recalling art historical compositions. The scenes depicted are adorned in a golden light, a warmth permeating throughout the series. The light lifts the subjects, giving the everyday scenes a sense of grandeur. The presence of the windows serves as a framing device, recalling the presentation of artworks in galleries. It also evokes the Trompe-l’œil trickery of Northern Renaissance paintings, the frame painted into the image, questioning the audience’s conception of image versus reality. In Sorgini’s work, we are audience to two realities: the private interior world of the subject, shown through the window, and the exterior realities reflected in the glass. We capture glimpses, objects and scenes of interior domesticity, which contrast the outside expanse of forests, gardens or open blue skies. Whilst this outside world was off-limits to many during the pandemic, for mothers, leaving home can be difficult under the weight of responsibilities and the, at times, isolating and trapping experience of new motherhood. 

The present exhibition of Behind Glass at CCP draws attention to possible art historical readings. Photographs are grouped to encourage viewers to read and reflect on artistic depictions of the baby Jesus, the Three Graces and memento mori still lives. A secondary grouping depicts women nursing their infant children. Learned cultural understandings encourages a comparison to the Madonna and Child. But the mothers’ faces are obscured, hidden whilst in the midst of enacting caring duties.

This is a subtle signal to Sorgini’s wider concerns for the series and the themes embedded in her artistic practice. Sorigini is interested in the often-unacknowledged and unseen care given by mothers; a care that is widely accepted and expected, if unrecognised and unappreciated. In her exploration of care, Sorgini also considers the transferral and evolution of care and how it manifests in a variety of situations. In one work, a middle-aged woman looks out the window. Beside her, an elderly woman is seated, her unfocused gaze directed towards the viewer. The relationship between mother and daughter has altered, shifted and now swapped.

In curating the show, we discussed Sorgini’s recent travels to Italy and her experiences there of viewing works, including Renaissance paintings, in churches and galleries. We wanted to capture some sense of this experience, and the works have been purposefully shifted to above centre-line so the viewer must gaze upwards. This imbues the subjects with a greater sense of importance, as the role of care should be given, and further underlines their comparison to masterpiece artworks.

Such reverence is particularly notable given the unflinching honesty of the images. While expressing deep love and tenderness towards their family, the mothers appear tired in their role as central caregiver and provider. Interactions largely seem to be based on touch and need – grabbing, suckling, holding, supporting – an amalgamation of limbs and flesh. Flesh is a central motif, and Sorgini recognises and records the distinct changes which occur to the body during and following birth, and the caring duties which follow. The body wears the scars of such change, from stretch marks to ageing skin.

At a panel with fellow exhibiting artists Ying Ang and Odette England, Sorgini spoke of the misunderstandings surrounding her work and the tendency for the images to be viewed sexually, related to the depiction of flesh and touch. A discussion ensued on the lack of awareness surrounding the relationships between children and mothers, as well as a wider misunderstanding concerning the messy realities of mothering and care.

Home Truths: Photography and Motherhood curated by Susan Bright was first exhibited in 2013 at the Foundling Museum, in collaboration with The Photographers’ Gallery, London. The exhibition sought to challenge stereotypes and sentimental views of motherhood, pursuing a depiction which was candid and revealing. In the decade since, honest revelations around motherhood remain relatively rare, and can ignite endless criticisms, their voices heightened in the age of social media. There is still much work to be done in centring, envisioning and reflecting the stories and experiences of motherhood, mothering and care, as is central to Sorgini’s practice. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and the Centre for Contemporary Photography © Lisa Sorgini

Installation views of Behind Glass at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Melbourne/Naarm until 9 April 2023. Photographs by Hannah Nikkelson. In a collaboration between the CCP and the V&A’s Women in Photography project, there will be a panel discussion with Ying Ang, Odette England and Lisa Sorgini, chaired by Susan Bright, on 5 April.


Catlin Langford is curator at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne/Naarm. She has previously held positions at the V&A, Royal College of Art and Royal Collection Trust. She will be undertaking a fellowship at Cité internationale des arts, Paris in spring 2023 to continue her research on autochromes. 

Images:

1-Hannah and Ochre in the dining room, Clunes © Lisa Sorgini

2-Leah and Ethan in the bedroom #2, Pottsville © Lisa Sorgini

3-Jules and Alby in the dining room, St Helena © Lisa Sorgini

4-Amelia and Una in the dining room © Lisa Sorgini

5-Sarah and Ellaine in the living room, South Golden Beach © Lisa Sorgini

6-Beck with Matilda and Indigo at the front door #2, Mullumbimby © Lisa Sorgini

7-Hannah and Ochre in the dining room, Clunes © Lisa Sorgini

8-Abigail and Marigold in the kitchen #2, Federal © Lisa Sorgini

9-Installation ‘Behind Glass’ at Centre for Contemporary Photography © CCP/Hannah Nikkelson

10-Installation ‘Behind Glass’ at Centre for Contemporary Photography © CCP/Hannah Nikkelson       

References:

[1] Calla Wahlquist, “How Melbourne’s ‘short, sharp’ Covid lockdowns became the longest in the world”, The Guardian, 2 October 2021.