Every Photograph is a Farewell

The Phatory is pleased to announce its second exhibition of the work of Talal Refit, an Iraqi artist now working in Germany. The exhibit opens on June 23rd and runs through July 17th. The artist will be present at a reception to be held at the gallery on June 23rd from 7:00 to 9:00.

The exhibit consists of photographic work printed on unwoven wool, bottled holographic prints on screen, and interactive digital projections. Refit work in these media confronts the centrality of a media ecology in the modern world, a centrality that has been made particularly acute for the artist by his status as a political exile whose only contact with his homeland is mediated by images. Thus for him, the meditation on images and their social roles is more personal than theoretical, with every picture functioning as a farewell letter to a troubled land he was forced to leave years ago.

In placing images on wool, and in allowing the viewer to interact with them in his digital work, Refit seeks to use the surface not only as a culturally appropriate medium but also to shift the viewer perception away from the transparency with which images are usually perceived to a slower, more conscious, perception that resists the onslaught of images that Refit notes now serve to define the fate of nations. With the fate of his own homeland so much in the balance, and the fate of all of our lives so intertwined with the images that help define them, Refit work asks us to step back from and both appreciate and reflect on the mediated world that is given to us in contemporary experience.