The new exhibition and event series “Viral Hallucinations”, which will take place at the temporary Haus der Photographie from 2024 to 2026, opens the curatorial program of the new curator Nadine Isabelle Henrich. “Viral Hallucinations” addresses the role of photographic and AI-generated images in the growing social influence of conspiracy theories. Exhibitions, lectures and workshops will present current image cultures that move between the spheres of humor, distraction, ideologies and systematic disinformation.
Image above: Andrea Orejarena & Caleb Stein, Abraham Lincoln & Drone. 2021 © Orejarena & Stein
The first exhibition in the series presents the New York duo Andrea Orejarena and Caleb Stein. “Tactics and Mythologies – A Photographic Road Trip through the Visual Worlds of Viral Conspiracy Theories” presents photographic and filmic works by Orejarena & Stein from September 7, 2024 to January 26, 2025. They explore the practices of simulation techniques and narratives of disinformation.
The artist duo Andrea Orejarena (1994, Colombia), cognitive scientist and photographer, and Caleb Stein (1994, UK), documentary photographer, are known for conceptual documentary projects that deal with individual perception and the collective construction of reality. Their artistic archive reveals a repertoire of image types, codes, patterns and motifs that manifest a dynamic typology and constantly growing visual world of visual disinformation and simulation fantasies.
Orejarena and Stein have developed this examination of images that question our relationship to reality, sometimes with a wink, sometimes with a paranoid gaze, into their own photographic concept that loosely follows an atlas of conspiracy-theory locations in the USA. Their series “American Glitch” documents the landscapes of the USA based on viral imagery as a simulation. Her work has been published in the New York Times, The Guardian, i-D Vice, Vogue Italia, and Wallpaper*, among others.
»AMERICAN GLITCH«
As a growing distrust in the distinction between reality and fiction characterizes our present, the duo Andrea Orejarena and Caleb Stein have been exploring social media and photography since 2020. The result is an archive of over 2,000 photographs and current image forms that manifest the influence of conspiracy narratives on American society and individual perception. In the installation “American Glitch”, this archive of photographic forms of “alternative facts” and “glitches in real life” enters into a dialog with the landscape photographs by Orejarena & Stein, which document and decode the supposed locations of conspiracy theory events. By taking up photographic road trip traditions, “American Glitch” interweaves continuities from American photographic history with the new phenomena of contemporary online culture.
The result is an initial cartography of conspiracy theory locations in the USA, which forms the starting point of the exhibition. Following this map, the artists traveled through the USA to document it as a “simulation”. Their symmetrically composed photographs, taken frontally with a digital Hasselblad medium-format camera, are in the pictorial tradition of canonical concept photographers such as Ed Ruscha and documentary-motivated projects of a photographic “survey” of the USA.
»LONG TIME NO SEE«
Since their project “Long Time No See” (2015-2020), the duo has been working on the pressing question of what role photography can play in the interplay between perception and imagination today. “Long Time No See” was created together with young Vietnamese artists and veterans near Hanoi and traces the artistic examination of today’s memories and consequences of the Vietnam War.
In poetic portraits and landscape views, “Long Time No See” shows a visual search for the nuances of dissonant historiographies and image forms between documentation and subjective perception. The project critically reflects on American conventions of war representation and tests collaborative photographic forms. The sound installation “War Words” brings competing historical (dis)information campaigns into a dialog and opens up a perceptual space between local mythologies, military tactics and emotional media impact.
WHEN?
Opening: Friday, September 06, 2024, 7 p.m. at PHOXXI. House of Photography Temporary.
Exhibition dates: Saturday, September 07, 2024 – Sunday, January 26, 2025
Opening hours: Tuesday – Sunday, 11 am – 6 pm
WHERE?
PHOXXI. House of Photography Temporary / Deichtorhallen Hamburg
Deichtorstrasse 1-2
20095 Hamburg
