Carmen Dobre-Hametner: Untitled
Study room project / photo installation
Opening: February 16th, 6 p.m.
Opening talk by Veronika Marek Markovičová, followed by a discussion with Carmen Dobre-Hametner
16.02. – 29.03.2023
venue: tranzit.sk, Beskydská 12, 81105 Bratislava
open: Tuesday – Friday: 2:30 -6.30 p.m.
In her project Untitled (2021 - present), Carmen Dobre-Hametner steps away from the hurricane of images produced by the industries of our time and opts for taking long-exposure, medium-format portraits of her friends and acquaintances in the spectacular natural settings of Bavaria, where she lives. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's Short History of Photography, a key text in the history of the medium, she refers back to mid-19th century portraiture as shaped by a complete innocence to both the photographic pose and the destructive economic and social changes to come with capitalist industrialization. In contrast to the unassuming self-containment of the early sitters, our contemporaries give voice to a different Zeitgeist when faced with inhabiting a duration of minutes without moving. Expressions of uneasiness of varying intensities accrue with the passage of time, fitting for our troubled age which is running out of political solutions.
Carmen Dobre-Hametner (b.1978) is a Romanian artist based in Munich and working with the medium of photography. She is a lecturer at the Academie der Bildende Kuenste in Munich teaching seminars on the theories of photography. She also works as a freelancer researcher. Her most important exhibitions are: Identity Not Proven, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn (2022); Mit der Tür ins Haus fallen, Neues Museum, Nuernberg (2022); After the Fact. Propaganda in the 21st Century, Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich, (2017); Consuming History, (solo show), Kunstraum, Munich (2016); The Second Law (duo show with Suk Kuhn-Oh), National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest (2016); Inventing the Truth. On Fiction and Reality, representing Romania at the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale, The New Gallery of the Romanian Institute for Culture and Research in Humanities (2015). In 2012 she published a photobook at the University of Plymouth Press entitled Furries. Enacting Anthropomorphism. Carmen Dobre-Hametner’s artistic practice engages the protean nature of photography as a medium that changed shape under the pressure of shifting social conditions and the appearance of other media of automatic depiction such as cinema and video. In consequence, she does not restrict her projects to one type of photographic technique, format, or gaze. In terms of thematic interests, her work focuses on phenomena generated by the current phase of global capitalism, such as consumer culture, tourism, spectacle, or the climate crisis.
carmendobrehametner.de
Veronika Marek Markovičová completed her studies of theater and film at the Faculty of Arts of Palacký University in Olomouc (2008), the Department of Photography and New Media of the Academy of Fine Arts and Media in Bratislava (2014) and during internships at Vienna University and the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (2013). In addition to artistic photography, she is involved in curatorial projects, and writes about photography. She teamed up with Ján Viazanička and Michaela Pašteková to publish Dokument 1 (Document 1, 2019) – a magazine about contemporary Slovak documentary photography, before working with Viazanička to establish the website www.dokumentmagazin.sk, an online archive of Slovak photography, where she is primarily in charge of the articles section. In her regular column Trojexpozícia (Triple Exposure) published in Dokument and Fotonoviny (Photo News), Markovičová studies how people from various fields perceive photography. She is involved in the material and narrative possibilities of analogue photography while also working with original photography. She constructs and deconstructs her own story in a non-chronological fashion.
ERSTE Foundation is main partner of tranzit.
Media partners:
Artalk.sk, Flash Art CZ & SK, GoOut.net, Fotonoviny, Dokument magazín
