Daniel Steegmann Mangrané
I Am But Pure Gas, Air, Empty Space, and Time
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s exhibition at the Fotograf Gallery was presented as one of the highlights of the most recent edition of the Fotograf Festival. Given the theme of the festival – Cultura/Natura – the artist and the exhibition’s curator, Tomáš Pospiszyl, selected a set of works based on the contrasts between nature and civilization. Specifically, this was a smaller set of photographs of rainforest insects (from the order Phasmatodea), which are perfectly adapted to their environment, collages from the artist’s series Kiti Ka’aeté that present geometrical cuts from pictures of rainforest greenery, and, certainly no less important, verses by the poet Stela do Patrocínio. Steegmann, a Spaniard, lives in Brazil, and, through these exhibited works, strove to provide a metaphorical understanding of different dispositions/awareness of the spacetime of nature and Western humankind. The entirely natural culmination of his Prague show was the screening of a 16 mm film at the close of the exhibition, which presented a record of that which was captured by a camera sliding along a cable running through rainforest vegetation. This recording and reproduction of images and sound presented the viewers a powerful experience of “closeness”. However, the camera’s motion created space in our sense of understanding only to return to its nonlinear and non-segmented biocosm shortly afterwards. Its mechanical eye created a world that we understand and are capable of controlling. Recording technology has based on its function, proven to be a tool for designing “allowable” reality, on which not only our survival is based, but also our imagination.
#29 contemplation
Content
- ––– Project
- Matej Chrenka
- Matěj Skalický
- ––– Profiles
- Viktoria Binschtok
- Jáchym Myslivec
- Polina Karpova
- Ján Kekeli
- Tereza Kabůrková
- Martin Vongrej
- Clare Strand
- Mary Ellen Bartley
- Zbigniew Dłubak
- James Welling
- Petr Faster
- Jan Hudeček
- Miloš Šejn
- Jan Svoboda
- ––– Discoveries
- Schinster
- Rudolf Skopec
- Hilla Kurki
- ––– Theory
- Stieglitz/Equivalents
- ––– Events
- Paris Photo 2016
- The History of European Photography 1900-2000
- ––– Fotograf Gallery
- Daniel Steegmann Mangrané
- Jiří Poláček
- Rafani
- Václav Stratil
- ––– Reviews
- Libuše Jarcovjáková - Book of Life
- Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia: On the Needles of Days
- Artpress - The Great Interviews series: Photography
- Havel the Human Being
- Baňka's Reflections (and the need for a conflict of interests)
- The Photograph in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility and Its Outreaches
- Július Koller - One Man Anti Show
- ––– Portfolios
- "The Other Night Sky": Seeing and Counterseeing
Archive
- #35 living with humans
- #34 archaeology of euphoria
- #33 investigation
- #32 Non-work
- #31 Body
- #30 Eye In The Sky
- #29 Contemplation
- #28 Cultura / Natura
- #27 Cars
- #26 Documentary Strategies
- #25 Popular Music
- #24 Seeing Is Believing
- #23 Artificial Worlds
- #22 Image and Text
- #21 On Photography
- #20 Public Art
- #19 Film
- #18 80'
- #17 Amateur Photography
- #16 Photography and Painting
- #15 Prague
- #14 Commerce
- #13 Family
- #12 Reconstruction
- #11 Performance
- #10 Eroticon
- #9 Architecture
- #8 Landscape
- #7 New Staged Photography
- #6 The Recycle Image
- #5 Borders Of Documentary
- #4 Intimacy
- #3 Transforming Of Symbol
- #2 Collective Authorship
- #1 Face