Nominated and introduced by the MFA Curating Programme, Goldsmith's

Gwenaël Bélanger (Canadian, 1975)
Gwenaël Bélanger uses image-capturing devices to question linear perceptions of time.  He deconstructs and repositions the standard flow of images and provides a new perspective on the common and banal.

Bélanger plays with the medium of video, in which images are presented sequentially over a period of time. He shifts instances from their original positions to create fractured timelines in both his videos and static, composite photographs.   Specific moments from video are isolated and presented as individual photographs and this approach runs parallel to the production of photographs where a camera lens would capture the same instance in a singular frame.

The viewers’ expectations of photography are challenged by Bélanger’s work, as video expands the frame of an image over the course of time, and this is re-appropriated in the creation of an alternative narrative.  

Sandra Setzkorn (German, 1981)
Sandra Setzkorn combines painting, performance and photography to explore ideas about physicality and gender.

The source material of her works comes from film – generally male protagonists in action movies such as Blade Runner or Rambo – which she reinterprets with a female gaze. In her work formal elements are reversed, combined, repurposed and restructured. She makes physical, painted sets and costumes, becomes a character and is photographed as that character interacting with the sets. The final product is a photograph that is constructed from these elements.  Setzkorn works embraces the physicality of both painting and performance, making them manifest in the medium of photography. 

Flavia Sollner (German, 1983)
Presented in this edition of Photo50 is a series of Polaroid prints by Flavia Sollner called “The Night”.

Darkness takes an active role in these long-exposure photographs, by obscuring the visible and creating a constant flux of various inferred meanings. Sight – a sense that helps us to understand reality – is tricked and pure, visual comprehension, veiled.

Context is lost and the detached images that remain hover between a fragment of a dream, a vision or a staged reality.  Their hallucinatory quality conjures a range of associations and this is partly created through their double framing: first with the camera lens and then with darkness.