Paper Geographies

About

The expanded field of photography is represented by works that challenge the medium’s own specificity; including documentary and appropriated imagery, performance and sculpture, moving image, analogue processes, digital and 3D animation. This diversity of practice asks the viewer to consider how the physicality of the photographic image impinges on our sense of place in the world.

Each of the artists in Paper Geographies proposes a critical relationship to place, whether local or global, real or imagined. By foregrounding the performative act of the image - its material agency over its representational qualities -they expose the interplay between image and place. Works address locations from China, India, Europe and the UK, and themes of globalisation, home, borders, migration, trade and the Anthropocene are explored. 

Visual practices of material culture have commodified space, and photography has both naturalised and constructed a highly artificial image of the Earth’s surface, often with dire consequences for its eco-systems and communities. Today, it is hard to do anything other than scratch at the surface of the world, as we rarely encounter it in an unmediated way. The artists in this exhibition playfully trespass on the construction site of the image and its ideologies. They use photography to both think about and make place. Their works collectively culminating in an index of our own lost civilization.

All the artists are connected by a specific place, each having taught at Manchester School of Art. The exhibition continues with a response by Manchester School of Art students as part of the X Festival: 30thApril – 28thMay.