The Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete and KOLEKTIV8 present Critical Archives IV: Documents, the main exhibition of the new edition of the MedPhoto Festival, curated by Maria Marangou, Pavlos Fysakis and Dimitris Kechris. Artists: Andrea & Magda, Tommaso Bonaventura & Alessandro Imbriaco, Bill Balaskas, Joachim Brohm, Lorenzo Castore, Alvaro Deprit, Forensic Architecture, Johan Grimonprez, Haris Grigorakis, Dimitris Harissiadis, Galatia Iatraki, Yvette Kapsala, Maria Karkanaki, Tonia Koinaki, Panos Kokkinias, Dimitris Michalakis, Costas Mitropoulos, Richard Mosse, Laura Pannack, Max Pinckers, Georgia Ponirakou, Dimitris Sidirokastritis, Alec Soth, Marilena Stafylidou, Ioannis Stefanidis, Alexis Vasilikos.
The main exhibition of the MedPhoto Festival 2019-2020, which opens on November 7th and takes place at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete from November until January, looks into ways in which different kinds of visual documents are produced, circulated, classified and stored or re-interpreted and recontextualized/reframed by individuals, communities or institutions in varying historical conditions.
In this year’s exhibition, works of art are “read” as visual evidence, are interconnected and archived anew, while their interpretative/hermeneutical boundaries are explored and examined across the public and the private sphere. Such works may constitute art products, personal stories or social testimonies. These images or pieces of evidence – archives-in-the-making – discuss social relations and their transformation in the course of time, their construction and spatialisation. How do such documents come to terms (or not) with living experience and its connection with History and memory? With the condition of post-truth and the role of technology in its construction and dissemination? How do they make us talk about family and death?
Considering the taking of each image and the process of sequencing a series of images to be a gesture of attributing meaning to a cultural and historical process, this exhibition discusses relevant social and political practices of constructing archives of (visual) “data” and the way these archives convey a meaning to our lives and/or become the tools with which we come to terms with every historical condition.
An open discussion with academics/artists/curators will be realised on the 6th of November, one day before the opening of the exhibition, at 19.00 at the “House of Culture” in Rethymno, under the title “Archives-in-the-making: Visual archives as tools for processing and reconstructing reality”.
In the Museum there will also be a presentation of photobooks related to the notions described above, curated by Zoetrope.
On the day of the inauguration there will take place the announcement of the winner of the MedPhoto Award coming with a prize of 3,000 euro. This year’s jury are Oliver Chanarin, Federico Clavarino, Alvaro Deprit, Marion Hislen and Katerina Stathopoulou.
Under the auspices of: Municipality of Rethymno, Region of Crete
Grand Sponsor: MOTOR OIL
Sponsors & Partners: ANEK LINES/Blue Star Ferries, Benaki Museum, Grecotel Hotel and Resorts, N.D.F Group.
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