Isak Berbic

Artist Statement

The parameters of documentary practice are difficult to define. Many of its early practitioners, Lewis Hine, Sergei Eisenstein for example, did not think of themselves as artists but rather activists driven by social concerns. Others, Walker Evans for example, went to great lengths to disavow political motivation in favor of a rigorous modernism. This disagreement, in fact an ideological struggle over the stakes of realist representation, has persisted throughout the history of the photography, cinema, video and digital photography. However, interpretation is constructed through ideology. Our readings of past culture are subject to the demands of the historical present. Mystified interpretation universalizes the act of interpreting, lifting it above history and sociopolitical context.

The use of indexical, representational medium as a carefully constructed critique of the limits of ‘the real’ suggests an intervention in the politics and semiotics of representation. My argument is that exposing this problem contests the prevailing dichotomy between truth and fiction that is said to be at the root of truth in the form, by advocating that it is not a simple choice between truth or fiction but rather a choice of formulating certain strategies of fiction to reach relative truths. The old myth that photographs tell the truth has been replaced by the new myth that they lie.

In the work Retouching Photographs of Ruins the photographs of brutally destroyed homes, treated on the surface in spray-paint with decorative motifs invoke a delusional positivism. This delusion persists despite all the objective evidence to the contrary. It is, therefore, a kind of inverse paranoia: for example a persistent belief that everything is going to be well in the end even though by all rational judgement, it clearly is not. The tension between the realism: the informational content in the photograph, and aesthetic, decorative application facilitates repeated translation of events into simulacrum truths, or potential political ideology. The addition of decorative artifice infuses a surrogate of romanticism superimposed over military destruction thus problematices the formal vacancy of the photograph. Resultant abjective space in which the photographs position themselves’ wrestle with topes such as ethnographical cinema and tourist arts. Whoever seeks truth finds it. The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth. The simulacrum is true. An awry gaze rests on a two-dimensional facade of the surface of the photograph. It rests on the ambivalence and desperation of desire, and the difference between those who have all kinds of stuff and those who haven’t.

My work Sahara 1994, Sahara 2004., deals with the chronicle of the systematic process of forgetting and disregarding. The photographs are of a remote, barren field in Denmark that once housed hundreds of Bosnian refugees living in tents, amongst whom my family and I lived for two years. I exhibit family photographs taken during our stay in the camp alongside the photographs of the stillness of the current landscape. The dissonance between the docile landscape of the art historical tropes of landscape painting and the reality of its actual context, interrogates how the passage of time obscures history and allows it to repeat itself. However, the photographic description of the fields shows little trace of it’s history, it’s grounds were a refugee camp for Jews escaping Nazi’s during WW ii, and exactly 50 years later a refugee camp for Bosnians. In a settlement numbering over 300 refugees everyday life, school, weddings, births and burials happened under the tent canvas. Representation and document, critical housing, nomadic living, space, land and politics became the object of my study and art practice.