Fig. 

Image: Fig. 76 Ficus Religiosa, Tel Aviv, Israel. When 16-year-old Palestinian, Aamer Alfar, blew hemself up in a Tel-Aviv market on 1st November, 2004, this leaf was propelled to the ground by the force of the explosion. Trees empty of their leaves are a common sight around the vicinity of such attacks.

Artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin create a contemporary take on the Victorian ‘cabinet of curiosities’ in this collection of over eighty photographs made by them over the last three years.

The exhibition features an astonishing range of still lives, portraits and landscape images made both in the UK and abroad. Subjects include fantastical objects from museum collections such as a ‘Merman’ skeleton, a single leaf blown from a tree in Tel Aviv by the blast of a suicide bomb, the hand of the world’s tallest living man, and the plastic bag collection of ‘Aunty Ethnie’, a relative of the artists.

Displayed and numbered in a pseudo-scientific way, each image has an accompanying caption written by the artists – hence the title Fig., an abbreviation of the word figure, a term used in museum catalogues. These personal captions allow them to ingeniously connect their disparate subjects, often in witty, unexpected, and moving ways.
http://www.impressions-gallery.com/exhibitions/exhibition.php?id=23