KW Institute for Contemporary Art presents a selection of photographs by the late French artist, writer and activist Hervé Guibert (1955-1991) in the solo exhibition Hervé Guibert – This & More from 10 June 2023. The exhibition is curated by Anthony Huberman, director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, and explores aspects beyond the photographic snapshots.
Image above: Hervé Guibert, Chambre de Mathieu, c. 1989; © Christine Guibert/Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris.
Guibert is best known for his portraits, but he also photographed interiors, objects and empty spaces – an important, still comparatively unknown part of his work. In a laconic and subtle way, these photographs enable a kind of portraiture in which what matters is what is not in the picture. The interiors, charged with love and trauma, invite imaginative readings of the stories of those who live or once lived in them. The photographs reveal intimate glimpses into the artist’s life while maintaining privacy by keeping the protagonists at a safe (or tragic) distance outside the edges of the image.
Rather than conveying a sense of objectivity or “truth”, the exhibition points to all that remains invisible in photographs: Memories, anecdotes, absences and the complexities of the subjective. Guibert’s images of objects and private spaces are imbued with the ghostly absence of those who once inhabited and left them behind. In this sense, the exhibition deals with those “truths” that lie dormant in a photograph – invisible to our eye and yet quite essential to the image. It proposes images about what is missing from the images.
Curator: Anthony Huberman, Assistant Curator: Sofie Krogh Christensen
WHEN?
Opening: Friday, 9. June 2023, 7pm
Exhibition: Saturday, 10. June to Sunday, 20. August 2023
Wed–Mon 11am–7pm, Thu 11am–9pm, Tue closed
WHERE?
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
KUNST-WERKE BERLIN e. V.
Auguststraße 69
10117 Berlin-Mitte
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