VAMP(YRE) REALITY.
Vamp(yre) Reality: Rīgas Fotogrāfijas biennāle (RFB), Riga, Latvia, 18.04.24 - 20.06.24
Materials: photographs, gauze screen, VR, AI, 3 video projections, roving light and a sound track
Vamp(yre) Reality
Lindsay Seers and Keith Sargent principle concerns are the nature of consciousness and how it shapes human life. The work of Henri Bergson pervades their practice as a method.
Current thought is that there is no singular consciousness but a flux of thoughts and emotions that are framed in every given moment. (It is likely that Virginia Woolf had read Bergson. She mentions, in her novel Orlando that every person has at least 2052 selves).
The works unfold in the making as in an act of performance. One thing leads to another. It is only realised fully in the exhibition hall, a punctuation in the continuity of the works evolution.
The stories we tell ourselves are not truths but frameworks to justify our actions post events. Human action as such (if Libet is correct, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet) come before thought. We act spontaneously and then we create a plausible narrative for that action. The narrative is a work of fiction, a justification from a hidden impulse.
S&S have developed a language of blending objects, environments, light, sound, VR and CGI in a search for hidden ‘truths’. Their work often references human, animal and plant life with an ultimate desire to create a new philosophy of ‘metaphysical thought’ that can chime with the current science it evokes.
S&S seek out the random events that may seem connected and causal but are not. Taking a cue from Vilém Flusser’s ‘Towards a Philosophy of Photography’. S&S push the photographic programs to their limits, searching towards innovations both in their forms and processes.
The state of photography seems to be most interested in ‘the mass of photography’ rather than its singular content (its ‘likes’ and redistribution). This runs against S&S’ fascination for the agency of individuals and the specificity of their narratives; their uniqueness.
In Vamp(yre) Reality the portraits from an album found in a hidden bookshop in Riga are speaking, being brought to life by AI. The speaking photographs are not silenced by an image as Seers own process.. It was unprecedented at that time. When working with ‘being a human camera’, the process involves her using a mouth as a camera by putting photographic paper in her mouth and exposing it either with the shape of the mouth as in a kiss. It is the case that even as we form our lips into a kiss an image is thrown upside down on our throat in an act of image cannibalism). She also used a mouth guard with a pinhole in it – a Plato’s cave of sorts. She has a black sack that she wears to protect the photographic paper. Images she made with colour paper were turned red with light passing through the blood of the cheeks. This is vampiric – she becomes a blood sucking monster …
Research on the subject of consciousness has been sustained over many years by Lindsay Seers and Keith Sargent through dialogues with eminent scientists such as Chris Frith, FRS FBA, professor emeritus at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuro-imaging at University College London; Anil Seth, professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex; Paul Fletcher, Bernard Wolfe Professor of Health Neuroscience, University of Cambridge; and science writer Philip Ball.
They have shown large scale works internationally in museums and art centres including SMK (National Gallery of Denmark); Venice Biennale 2015; Hayward Gallery, UK; MONA, Tasmania; Bonniers Konsthall, Sweden; Smart Project Space, Amsterdam; Kiasma, Finland; Turner Contemporary, UK; Tate Triennial, UK; TPW, Canada; Sami Centre for Art, Norway; Centre for Contemporary Art Poland; Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, UK; Sharjah Art Foundation (The Flying Saucer), UAE; Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Taiwan; E-Werk, Luckenwalde/Berlin, Germany.
Their works are in a number of collections including Tate collection, Arts Council collection, Artangel collection, collection of MONA, Tasmania, The Government Art collection, MTA Collection, Lebanon and a number of private collections in Amsterdam, Norway, UK, Ireland, USA, Canada, Paraguay, and Mauritius.
They have won several prestigious grants and awards such as the Sharjah Art Foundation Production Award, UAE; Le Jeu de Paume production award, France; the Paul Hamlyn Award; the Derek Jarman Award; AHRC Award; a number of Wellcome Trust Awards and Arts Council and British Council Awards in support of the works and Seers also received the Wingate Scholarship from The British School at Rome 2007/8.
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