f&d cartier Wait and See: A Retrospective

About

Following on from the UK Premiere of Wait and See at Diffusion: Cardiff International Festival of Photography, Ffotogallery is delighted to present a specially commissioned retrospective exhibition of work reflecting developments in the practice of Swiss artist duo f&d cartier over the past decade. The exhibition is also accompanied by a new artist monograph published by Ffotogallery. Photography is fundamentally a time-based medium, not just in the camera's ability to capture a moment in time and commit it to memory, but also because of a photograph's embodiment of space in time; its imprinting of duration. The earliest photographic processes, whether Fox Talbot's chemically treated papers or Daguerre' silvered plates, required lengthy exposures and the resulting images were essentially durational in nature, each photograph formed by the accretion of many impressions over time. These elements converge in the art of f&d cartier, two Swiss artists living and working in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. Since 1995 they have merged their respective practices, fine art and photography, and created a unified artistic identity in order to discover new approaches. Examining the indispensable prerequisites for analogue photography, light and photosensitive paper, they mainly make ‘camera-less' works incorporating found objects. Two bodies of work featured in this exhibition, Wait and See and Veni Etiam, exemplify their minimalist tendencies, and provide a meditation on perception, experience and the passing time. The exhibition also includes the piece Boys do not Cry, from a series of photogram-based works called Roses, which explores the themes of time, mortality, eroticism, gender and identity. A Ffotogallery project funded by Pro Helvetia (Swiss Arts Council), Swiss Cultural Fund in Britain and Swisslos Culture Canton de Berne, in partnership with Departure Lounge and University of Hertfordshire.