Date: 10.10.2016 — 06.11.2016
Beginning: 19:00
To philosophise is to learn how to die
One say that to understand what it means to be an authentic human being is to accept and appreciate the fact that we are going to die. To cope with the fact that we constantly project our lives onto the horizon of death or how Martin Heidegger would call it we are dealing with “being-towards-death”. It is an indisputable fact that contemporary society isn’t keen on accepting the issue of death. The politics of fear and it’s ultimate argument – death – come into usage as a tool to keep people dependent from the power. Although an authentic human life can only be found by facing finitude and trying to make a meaning out of the end of our life, we rather stay alive in the artificial but safe environment, under protection that takes from our existence this genuine factor – mortality.
In his photography Drod Daum regards the subject of authenticity in intelligent and not straightforward way. His images are very often manipulated and post-produces however in an manner that deconstructs the idea of “photoshopped image”, just to mention, quite banal and overused nowadays. To observe his photographies is to watch carefully every image seeking for mistake that could put us back on the division between what is natural and artificial. Yet I believe that what is fascinating in this two terms is when we understand that culture (means what is fake) is all about making an attempt to petrify nature. To capture its moments and frieze it in order to falsely shape and fashion our selfhood.
curated by Piotr Sikora
Dror Daum (b. 1970, Jaffa) is based in Tel Aviv. He has had solo exhibitions at Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art; and Alon Segev Gallery, Tel Aviv, among others. Select group exhibitions include: Art TLV, 2nd Tel-Aviv Biennale of Contemporary art, Tel-Aviv; Kuandu Museum of Fine Art, Taipei; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Daum has received awards from the Israel Ministry of Culture in 2014 and 2005, and from the Bezalel M.F.A. program in 2008.
His works attempt to illustrate modern life in the shadow of constant hight anxiety. Instead of addressing photography in its historic function he programmatically avoids conventional processes by seeing photography as an imagination alternatively as an object of the world and changing the reciprocal relations between photography and space.
Piotr Sikora (b. 1986, Krakow) – graduated in Art History at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Critic and author of texts for exhibition catalogues. Member of the Polish Section of AICA. From 2013 until 2015 he has been curating ShowOFF Section at Photomonth in Krakow. He won a scholarship of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage. Ardent player of bike polo. He lives and works between Prague and Krakow.
