Fables
Knorr, Karen (2008) Fables. [Photography]
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Fables consists of 45 photographs taken across heritage and museum sites in France, collected in the book Fables Karen Knorr (2008). These large-format lamda prints and photographs have also been presented in 17 solo exhibitions and over 25 group exhibitions in France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Canada, India and the UK. The context for the work is large-format staged or constructed fine art photographic practice (e.g. the work of Crewdson, Wall, Sherman, Sugimoto, Hunter and others).
The project evolved out of my work from the 1980s to 2000s, which challenged the institutional spaces of the museum and academy as sites of power through humour, irony and storytelling. The current work explores a new type of photographic imagining, using recent technological developments in digital photography: these make possible the digital insertion of the animal into the image as a trangressive device, creating a new hybrid object between photography, drawing and painting.
My aim is to expand photography as an allegorical form using the fable as a thematic and playful device: digital technologies are used to create a new photographic aesthetic that is able to develop institutional critiques in an accessible and entertaining way. At the same time the work involves a critique of the photograph as document: by combining analogue and digital photography, it troubles the ontological status of the photographic image.
The research crosses the disciplines of museology, aesthetics, feminism and animal studies in its investigation of the concept of animality, museology and natural history. It uses visual means to raise questions about the 'other' and alterity. The animal appears as a transgressive cipher (referencing surrealism) disrupting the order of things in locations of cultural power and challenging assumptions of cultural and national identity in European museums and heritage sites.
The book 'Fables Karen Knorr' was published by Filigranes éditions, 2008, ISBN: 9782350461359. Includes text by Lucy Soutter and Nathalie Leleu.
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