Build
2015
Essay by Colin Davis
Meteorologists have an expression for the visibility of storms that have peaked and are dissipating: losing their identity. The photographic commission—Build—captures a singular event: the construction of a new art school. The images capture a community that is already losing its identity: a building site is a micro-community, which, like a weather front, has a finite life span.
The everyday occurrence of construction—new build, brown-site regeneration, or omnipresent roadworks—are events we encounter each day. The everydayness of an event creates its own anonymity. Henri Lefebvre hints at this modern-day phenomenon when he comments, ‘If we want to search the everyday for the non-signifiers which may be active within it we must catch them in the rough, in their unconscious or misunderstood situation, and not like water-creatures wrenched from the deep and left to die in the light of day’.
Photography with its documentary associations has both struggled and proffered to pull the every day into existence without leaving its exposed subject ‘to die in the light of day’.
Typologies, like those presented in Build, are always in tension with the photographic histories. The tensions presented in Kilumets’ images are between the art and artefact, subject and viewer, and personal identity and communal identity, and to bring us back to Lefebvre’s every day, they capture ‘(the) point of mediation between the controlled and uncontrolled’.
Simply put, although we perceive the every day of no consequence, it is also the very place that confirms the structures in modern living: we notice our journey into work when we are held up by roadworks; a nation’s health system materialises when we are queuing in a casualty department after a fall. It is when something is brought into focus—by its use—that it becomes demystified and is made real to us: 'Man must be everyday, or he will not be at all’!
The catalyst for this exhibition was to use the photograph to act as intervention into the every day and explore what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘regimes of the arts’. The photograph is the perfect art form to explore the regime, the heterogeneity of the aesthetic experience. The photographs here will be experienced by many participants: not only the subject but also a myriad of viewers, such as family and colleagues, academic connoisseurs, cleaners, students, and casual browsers.
For Rancière, the aesthetic image is determined by its historical context vis-a-vis the viewer. His formation of the viewer (or the viewee) is not a reification of either technology or psychoanalysis as it is for Walter Benjamin, for instance, who describes how the camera acts as a conduit to your ‘optical unconscious’. Artistic expression is more pluralistic—not defined by its autonomy alone—but always connected to a wider world of the social.
This is not naiveté on Rancière’s part; rather, it provides an intellectual basis for his broader thoughts on supporting radical equality. Put bluntly: Rancière believes people can think, and in the circulation of culture/language/image, it is aesthetics that acts as the synapse for thinking.
Disrupting the exchange of ideas is something Rancière is acutely aware of in his observation that we are often told by officials (at a police arrest, for instance), ‘There is nothing to see, nothing happening, nothing to be done, but to keep moving circulating…’ In the act of being encouraged to keep ‘circulating’, we are being encouraged to stop observing. Repression of the aesthetic impulse is a political act. Concomitantly, critical discourses in art, increasingly, separate the casual observer from art by creating art that is both mirrored and denied ad infinitum.
City buildings are named after benefactors, corporations, or, increasingly in London, simple abstractions: The Shard, Cheese Grater, Walkie-Talkie, etc. They are corporate monuments, and the building (of the building) is erased by this monumentality. A process of one community erasing another: community of occupiers over one of builders. Build records the moment before this political act is executed—it intervenes in this everyday act of forgetting. By doing so, the photographs document Rancière’s poetic observation: ‘A political difference is always on the shore of its own disappearance’.
The images published here—although initially a typology of anonymous builders—gradually conflate to create a community. Individual poses are replicated in image after image (the men were not told how to ‘pose’), yet individual poses become a collective stance.
The images document a community of connections: the familial, of fathers and sons; the geographic, fitters from Liverpool, electricians from Newcastle; and corporate, uniforms and hardhats.
Build embodies the ‘logic of sense’ in Rancière’s political communities where ‘distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts’.
This essay opens with the simile of a dissipating storm, which captures how the photographs in this book—in their stillness—halt the dissipation of a community.
A community is made up of shared endeavours, which are not always explicit to the individuals within the community—often separated by the anonymity of the every day: of actions and exigencies. Community is a shared place, but the time frames—when and how we occupy shared spaces—create a 'temporal thickness’ of individuals and collectives who inhabit the space.
The political notion of community—paraphrasing Rancière—is the distribution or sharing of the sensible. The commonality upon which a community is founded is sense, and politics first becomes a possibility with the institution of common sense. The photographs here capture a group of men who only exist as a community—their collective sense creates monoliths, hospitals, and art schools.
In this collection of photographs Holger Kilumets delineates the fragile nature of community.
Build
2015
Essay by Colin Davis
Meteorologists have an expression for the visibility of storms that have peaked and are dissipating: losing their identity. The photographic commission—Build—captures a singular event: the construction of a new art school. The images capture a community that is already losing its identity: a building site is a micro-community, which, like a weather front, has a finite life span.
The everyday occurrence of construction—new build, brown-site regeneration, or omnipresent roadworks—are events we encounter each day. The everydayness of an event creates its own anonymity. Henri Lefebvre hints at this modern-day phenomenon when he comments, ‘If we want to search the everyday for the non-signifiers which may be active within it we must catch them in the rough, in their unconscious or misunderstood situation, and not like water-creatures wrenched from the deep and left to die in the light of day’.
Photography with its documentary associations has both struggled and proffered to pull the every day into existence without leaving its exposed subject ‘to die in the light of day’.
Typologies, like those presented in Build, are always in tension with the photographic histories. The tensions presented in Kilumets’ images are between the art and artefact, subject and viewer, and personal identity and communal identity, and to bring us back to Lefebvre’s every day, they capture ‘(the) point of mediation between the controlled and uncontrolled’.
Simply put, although we perceive the every day of no consequence, it is also the very place that confirms the structures in modern living: we notice our journey into work when we are held up by roadworks; a nation’s health system materialises when we are queuing in a casualty department after a fall. It is when something is brought into focus—by its use—that it becomes demystified and is made real to us: 'Man must be everyday, or he will not be at all’!
The catalyst for this exhibition was to use the photograph to act as intervention into the every day and explore what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘regimes of the arts’. The photograph is the perfect art form to explore the regime, the heterogeneity of the aesthetic experience. The photographs here will be experienced by many participants: not only the subject but also a myriad of viewers, such as family and colleagues, academic connoisseurs, cleaners, students, and casual browsers.
For Rancière, the aesthetic image is determined by its historical context vis-a-vis the viewer. His formation of the viewer (or the viewee) is not a reification of either technology or psychoanalysis as it is for Walter Benjamin, for instance, who describes how the camera acts as a conduit to your ‘optical unconscious’. Artistic expression is more pluralistic—not defined by its autonomy alone—but always connected to a wider world of the social.
This is not naiveté on Rancière’s part; rather, it provides an intellectual basis for his broader thoughts on supporting radical equality. Put bluntly: Rancière believes people can think, and in the circulation of culture/language/image, it is aesthetics that acts as the synapse for thinking.
Disrupting the exchange of ideas is something Rancière is acutely aware of in his observation that we are often told by officials (at a police arrest, for instance), ‘There is nothing to see, nothing happening, nothing to be done, but to keep moving circulating…’ In the act of being encouraged to keep ‘circulating’, we are being encouraged to stop observing. Repression of the aesthetic impulse is a political act. Concomitantly, critical discourses in art, increasingly, separate the casual observer from art by creating art that is both mirrored and denied ad infinitum.
City buildings are named after benefactors, corporations, or, increasingly in London, simple abstractions: The Shard, Cheese Grater, Walkie-Talkie, etc. They are corporate monuments, and the building (of the building) is erased by this monumentality. A process of one community erasing another: community of occupiers over one of builders. Build records the moment before this political act is executed—it intervenes in this everyday act of forgetting. By doing so, the photographs document Rancière’s poetic observation: ‘A political difference is always on the shore of its own disappearance’.
The images published here—although initially a typology of anonymous builders—gradually conflate to create a community. Individual poses are replicated in image after image (the men were not told how to ‘pose’), yet individual poses become a collective stance.
The images document a community of connections: the familial, of fathers and sons; the geographic, fitters from Liverpool, electricians from Newcastle; and corporate, uniforms and hardhats.
Build embodies the ‘logic of sense’ in Rancière’s political communities where ‘distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts’.
This essay opens with the simile of a dissipating storm, which captures how the photographs in this book—in their stillness—halt the dissipation of a community.
A community is made up of shared endeavours, which are not always explicit to the individuals within the community—often separated by the anonymity of the every day: of actions and exigencies. Community is a shared place, but the time frames—when and how we occupy shared spaces—create a 'temporal thickness’ of individuals and collectives who inhabit the space.
The political notion of community—paraphrasing Rancière—is the distribution or sharing of the sensible. The commonality upon which a community is founded is sense, and politics first becomes a possibility with the institution of common sense. The photographs here capture a group of men who only exist as a community—their collective sense creates monoliths, hospitals, and art schools.
In this collection of photographs Holger Kilumets delineates the fragile nature of community.