LIST OF INVENTORY (PIECES OF AN ONGOING IMAGINARY THEATRE): Aylin Soyer Tangen Curated by Paal Boee

Aylin Soyer Tangen's exhibition deals with the nature of images as an everyday tool for imagining reality and to produce different 'cosmologies'. Her photographs investigate how this procedure influences our perception, ethics and scopes of action and communication.

 

The 'puzzle logic' of the exhibition aims to physically engage the visitors in a touring of the gallery space. In one part of the space, the spectator receives the role of the 'street photographer' who strolls through the city trying to capture intuitively the real meaning hidden inside coincidences and the 'magic of the moment', and 'behind' the visual surface of human actions and situations. Another side of the gallery room, with images taken from completely different settings and perspectives, engages the spectators in the fragmentary logic of 'dream image' sequences and alludes to cinematic language.

 

Through this paradoxical combination of narrative strategies, the genre conventions, cultural codes of interpretation and subjective expectations of the spectator are evoked. 'The subjective' and 'the objective', surface and depth; even the very 'presentness' of the present stand out as relative categories which are nonetheless constantly at play. The exhibition space questions the multiple, codified ways of relating to our natural, social and political world through images. Yet at the same time, the abstract character of the gallery space highlights it as a rare field of experience: A field which could make us reflect on the existential function of technologies of perception, such as photography itself.