Laura Cuch, Anastassios Kavassis and Orly Zailer | Surface of Self

© Laura Cuch, from the project "Sleepless", 2008

In partnership with Urban Photo Fest, Photofusion are pleased to present Surface of Self, a photography exhibition that brings together artists Laura Cuch (Spain), Anastassios Kavassis (Greece) and Orly Zailer (Israel), whose work in contemporary photographic portraiture raises questions around human subjectivity and cultural identity.

All three artists work with specific camera equipment to achieve their desired photographic results. On the one hand, Laura and Anastassios work with analogue cameras - Laura with a Rolleiflex 6x6 Twin Lens and Anastassios with an antique wooden camera – two technological apparatae that mediate their ways of engaging with people and make the process of taking portraits into something of a ritual. On the other hand, Orly works with a digital camera for both the video and stills parts of the project. She aims to distinguish between the different periods in which different media were used in her ongoing project in order to re-produce the old and new.

© Anastassios Kavassis, from the project "Athenians", 2012

Such rituals have enabled Laura, Anastassios and Orly to produce collections of portraits that invite the audience to reflect on broader social and cultural issues, by embodying diversity and difference and questioning cultural norms. What does it mean to be an Athenian today? How people that experience sleep deprivation make sense of such condition?

How is one’s identity affected by his or her physical resemblance to an ancestor? In Laura’s project Sleepless, the invisible matter of not sleeping is rendered visible through the performance of breathing exercises during the photographic sessions, and through the interplay between image and text in a collaborative creative process.

Anstassios’s work Athenians questions cultural and national identity within the context of the Greek economic breakdown, by portraying subjects with an obsolete technology that suggests a barely visible tension between change and historical reference. The portraits produced by these artists are far from being unidirectional: the subjects pose for the camera as part of a negotiated process of self-interrogation and self-assertion.

© Orly Zailer, from the project "The Time Elapsed Between Two Frames", 2012

In Orly’s work The Time Elapsed Between Two Frames, modern technology is used to emphasise the relationship between time and space, which play a central role in establishing a sense of familial and inter-generational continuity. Although the gaps between the pairs vary - the difficulty of the viewer to distinguish between the old and the new remains and causes them to constantly re-examine the nature of self in relation to surface.