The Region of Unlikeness

The idea of portraiture carries a lot of baggage with it; namely, that there is a name behind the portrait, there is a fidelity to, a likeness of. One need only to be a 'sensitive' enough artist to let the inner person emerge through the image. This transcendental desire has dogged portraiture for centuries. The Region of Unlikeness presents a group of artists from the U.K., Germany and the U.S., working with portraiture in video to confront and interrogate this assumption.

The title of the exhibition is taken from Plato's concept of 'regio dissimiltudinus' here, reinterpreted in secular form. Concentrating on what is most unlike us is where the imagination or destruction can begin to take hold. In not keeping fidelity to the likeness to our 'true' selves, we may operate in a region of negative construction. The work in this show experiments with the confines of the contours of what is given, either the limits of the given body, or the social restrictions that are given to it.

In the introduction to August Sander's People of the Twentieth Century, Alfred Doblin argued that the likeness of a portrait was the key to its artistry. Sander himself said: "It is not just a person's face that characterizes him, but also the way he moves." It was an intimation of the essential problem of a photographic portrait: in its stillness, it cannot represent the actuality in movement that is the sitter. All the artists in this show play with the tension between the still and the moving in portraiture and video.

In Simon Cunningham's Mollymuddle we see a male cradling his leg as if it were an infant, in a pose that recalls religious iconographic painting. The frame is composed as if it were a still photograph, but as we watch we notice a slight hovering to the body keeping still, heightening the sense of absorption and dislocation. The pose introduces a duality in the subject, what is of us, and not of us, a oneness and a fracturing both. Esther Teichmann also focuses on the strangeness of the slight in her three-minute piece Drinking Air. The piece depicts a woman immersed in bath-water, the water line against her stomach rises and falls as she breathes; we only know the figure by her torso. In Dorit Cypis's The Rest in Motion, a curtain is sucked and blown in and out of a hotel room window in Tel Aviv. The contours it forms in the strong wind suggests a constantly moving body, in a constant pull and push between what is interior and what is exterior.

Viola Yesiltac's Regional Express plays with early feminist filmmaking and current day reality show fetishes. Out of the thick of the forest, we see the form of a woman emerge; she struggles to pull a large black suitcase with her over the uneven ground. Her movement has a seriousness of purpose, but the source point for its action remains obscure, only determination remains. As the camera drifts farther and farther away in Corinna Schnitt's Sleeping Girl, we are both more estranged from the normality of the scene, and more and more of an omniscient observer, forced to try and make sense of the drift. The camera finally comes to rest on a faded reproduction of Vermeer's portrait, the girl who becomes the backdrop persona for Schnitt's deadpan use of an language which teases out the absurdity of structural norms, the confines of which we live within, and our complicity in participating in them.

The artists in The Region of Unlikeness are restless in their investigation of how to represent the absurdity of being in one's own body.

Kim Schoen's work in photography, video and film explores re-enactment and repetition, playing in the intersection between history, memory and fiction. She received her M.F.A. in Photography from California Institute of the Arts in 2005 and is currently persuing a Masters in Philosophy in the photography department at The Royal College of Art in London. Her photographs and video installations have exhibited in Los Angeles, Berlin, Madrid, and London. Kim was recently selected for the Artist Pension Trust in Los Angeles, and is one of the founding editors of the forthcoming MATERIAL, a journal of writing by visual artists.

The Region of Unlikeness
Kurator: Kim Schoen

Viola Yesiltac, Corinna Schnitt, Simon Cunningham, Dorit Cypis, Esther Teichmann