Death of a Cameraman
organized by Martin Waldmeier
apexart
291 Church Street
New York
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Opening reception:
Thursday, September 12: 6-8 pm
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On view:
September 13 – October 26, 2013
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Featuring work by:
Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Harun Farocki, Rabih Mroué
Hrair Sarkissian, Rudolf Steiner. An Unsolicited Proposal Program winning exhibition.
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On July 1, 2011, in the neighborhood of Karam Shami in Homs, Syria, a young man stands on the rooftop of a building. He uses his cell phone to document gunfire in the streets below as his camera suddenly catches sight of a gunman on an adjacent balcony. For a brief instant, the cameraman and the gunman directly face each other. A single shot is fired. The camera falls, and with the cameraman’s death, image and reality collapse into one.
In the course of recent political events, anonymous cameramen and women have emerged as powerful new figures in the politics of representation and mediation, documenting conditions that surround them while simultaneously carrying the biggest stakes in the telling of th eir story. They create images that do not necessarily show violence, but are visible manifestations of it; images that do not seek to create viewers, but witnesses.
Death of a Cameraman revolves around a powerful moment in which the making of an image becomes a matter of life and death, with the camera functioning both as an extension of the eye and as a weapon. The exhibition explores the power of images to influence reality and alter the course of events. Are cameras weapons? Can they penetrate reality? What’s at stake in the making of images? What does it mean to bear witness through them?
Martin Waldmeier is a curator from Basel, Switzerland, and currently a Ph.D. candidate in Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, writing a dissertation on translation as an artistic practice. Waldmeier was a Fulbright fellow in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, and received an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History from the University of Bern. His current research interests include aesthetics of migration, images and narrations of conflict, cultural translations, and the politics of language in the present-day cultural industry.
apexart’s exhibitions and public programs are supported in part by the Affirmation Arts Fund, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Greenwich Collection Ltd., Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts. This exhibition is also supported in part by the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation; the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia; Kalfayan Galleries, Athens-Thessaloniki; and Video Data Bank.
291 church street
New york, ny 10013
t. 212.431.5270
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ROBERTO ALBORGHETTI 
What an incredible exhibition. I would love to see it. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
Thank you Roger! Me too I was struck by this exhibition. And me too I’d love to see it…
Reblogged this on Art, Spirit, Nature and commented:
Finding the beauty in the everyday is on-mission for me. This is more challenging, for I dont often see the artist’s work as life and death. In this case, it surely is.
This work is about a photographer in Syria. But dont forget the chilling video uncovered by Chelsea (ne Bradley) Manning, available here.