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The Progressive Development Plan |
Maurizio Guillen, (United Mexican States) produces detailed photographic analyses of social situations in which individuals are restricted in their access to human interaction and public space. Building on recent developments in this area, Guillen approaches the art-social divide with long-range humour and content-rich visual analogies. Mustafa Hulusi (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) pulls razor-edged barbs from the soft image-belly of contemporary banality. In a soft, colour-rich culture, Hulusi’s polished and severe monochrome images of defunct war machinery and synthetic femininity attack the embarrassing secret of the media image; the pleasure of looking above the content seen. Ergin Cavusoglu (Republic of Bulgaria) creates scenes of surveillance which collide the video aesthetic of political paranoia with the intimate voyeurism of the urban drifter. Cavusoglu’s subjects are people and urban landscapes, each endowed with a strong, idiosyncratic presence, yet always alien to each other. Susanne Kohler (Federal Republic of Germany) forms elegant composite silhouettes of female urban cyclists, framed by romantic foliage within old-fashioned frames. Kohler’s primitive yet detailed silhouette technique produces contradictory evocations of metropolitan life and its apparent repression of the sublime in daily experience, which erupt in Kohler’s evanescent figures. Alison Moffett (United States of America) bypasses contemporarie life and escaping shifts into a fantasy word tha lusts for the moving and the meloncholic. She creates large scale drawings, painstakingly meticulas depicting frozen scenes from bleak beauty not to be found outside stories and literature. In these, botanical illustration is enlarged and combined with imaginative narrative, sinister and perfect. O Zhang (The Peoples republic of China) photographs small Chinese girls as they crouch down and stare back at the camera. Dominating the frame and the spectator, Ziang’s little subjects offer oddly sinister and uncomprehending expressions. The West’s self-conscious fascination with contemporary China reverberates through Ziang’s portraits, which co-opt the brand-logo myth of childhood innocence and global harmony, making her endearing subjects alien, monstrous and threatening.
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