Text

Piktogram is presenting works by Daniela & Linda Dostálková and is hosting Hot Wheels (Athens/London) with works by Yorgos Prinos and KIN (Brussels) with works by Yalda Afsah and Thibaut Henz.

CURRO, is a 32 minute film that explores the ritualized taming of wild horses according to the Galician custom Rapas das Bestas, questioning the social construction of masculinity, dependence and alienation from nature through the act of “taming” at play in interspecies relationships. CURRO follows Yalda Afsah’s dedication to these human-animal relationships, a topic the artist has been exploring in her practice since 2018. The film turns its attention to the violent bid for submission in this centuries-old tradition in which men corral a herd of wild horses in order to trim their manes and tails. Afsah’s seemingly classical narrative arc from anticipation to act charts a taxonomy of gazes, as the viewer might become aware of themselves watching and waiting just as the men and adolescent onlookers do in the picture. The ambivalence that permeates Afsah’s work more broadly emerges here in the tension between the crassness of the ritual and the way that she handles it visually and sonically. There’s something tactile in her approach. She often draws out sounds of touch, amplifying the contact between horses pressing closer together, wind moving through leaves, or a boy etching marks into a tree. A subtle tool of reorientation, Afsah’s soundscape is emblematic of her intervention in the seemingly detached posture of the beholder. Her patient observation nods to the durational contemplation of James Benning, with whom she studied in Los Angeles. Ultimately, by excavating displays of hyper-masculinity and teenaged initiation into such performativity, Afsah questions where art sits on the axis between the violence of spectatorship and the generosity of paying attention.

In the context of this form of domestication, in which wild horses are herded out of the mountains and into the valley to be sheared and marked by the “aloitadores” (gal. for fighters), the supposed assumption of responsibility for the animal contrasts with the forlornness and disorientation of the human protagonists as they wait in the wilderness; they seem to be out of place, alienated from the natural landscape that surrounds them. 

An industrial relic; a young man looking into the camera; pink peonies. The frightened eye of a cow. Bodies, places, objects, textures – subjective records of environments, encounters, of objets trouvés. Thibaut Henz’s photographs are very direct, focusing on the physical presence of people and things, on their immediate physicality. Always close-ups, always highlighted by the flash, as if torn out of a larger image. Never the product of a zoom, never cropped, the images seem to have been there before they were taken. Without a specific context, as if removed from time and place, they oscillate between presence and withdrawal, offering a visual experience of contingency. Yet they seem to insist on the uniqueness and fragile, raw, even brutal beauty of intimate moments captured by the camera.

For Thibaut Henz, each of his photographs contains a narrative and abstract visual information that can stand on its own, but also enriches others. These photographs are never shown alone, but in pairs, tableaus or clusters. Images taken in different places at different times are juxtaposed or combined, drawing attention to matching colours, shapes and textures, to analogies in compositional detail. There is no context given, no relationship between the two parts of the diptych revealed. And yet, there is a bond that holds them together tightly.

Always irritatingly close to his subject, Thibaut Henz reduces the images to their immediate visuality, their tactile qualities, the composition they carry within themselves. The images find their corresponding partners and unfold parallel realities, simultaneities in time, challenging the viewer to respond with their own readings, their own contexts and references. We cannot place these images in any logical context; they remain fragments, enigmatic yet eloquent, strange and fascinating. These works seek an associative reading. They do not want to be ‘understood’ or ‘analysed’. They embody a subjective pictorial language transformed into artistic photography coupled with the act of exposing bodies and life circumstances to us, challenging our response to the immediacy and urgency of what we see.

Faces is an ongoing series of portraits taken in the streets of London’s financial district. The series consists of individual works and one predetermined set of sixteen images that was shown at Prinos’ solo exhibition with the gallery in Athens in 2022, installed in a single row. Each discreet combinations of images can either emphasize the unity or the diversity of the men that move through urban centers, similar or dissimilar along the lines of race, age, or presumed social class. The linear presentation of the series, the consistent size of the works, and the varying clarity of the images (some faces are sharp while others are out of focus) references the time-based experience of film, which remains a key reference for Prinos’ photographic work. Taken together or in segments, Faces presents a varied and open portrait of a city in time.