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Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin new article content ...

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin new article content ...

Adam Broomberg (born 1970) and Oliver Chanarin (born 1971) are artists living and working in London, whose work has been exhibited, published and collected internationally. In June 2013, they won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for their critically acclaimed work, War Primer 2.

Broomberg and Chanarin have had numerous international exhibitions including The Gwagnju Biennale, the Stedelijk Museum, the International Center of Photography, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, The Photographers Gallery and Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art. Broomberg and Chanarin teach at the Ecole supérieure d'arts appliqués and are Visiting Fellows at the University of the Arts London. Their work is represented in major public and private collections including Tate Modern, The Museum of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Musee de l’Elysee, The International Center of Photography and Loubna Fine Art Society. They are the first duo to be awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

DB Prize

Broomberg and Chanarin were awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for their critically acclaimed work War Primer 2 in June 2013. The prize, was established in 1996, and is awarded to an artist or artists for a ”significant contribution to the medium of photography either through an exhibition or publication in Europe”. Broomberg and Chanarin’s work, which physically inhabits Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer (Kriegsfibel,1955), overlays Brecht’s original images, taken from newspaper clippings about World War II, with screen grabs and grainy mobile phone footage relating to the ‘War of Terror’, sourced from the internet. These images accompany Brecht’s original four-line ‘Photo-epigrams’, which he intended to be utilised as a means of translation for the ‘hieroglyphic’ images circulated in the media. War Primer 2 was published by MACK books in 2011, as a limited edition of 100 individually handmade books, which sold out overnight.

Brett Rogers, Director of The Photographers’ Gallery explained why the pair were chosen by this years jury for “their bold and powerful reimagining of Brecht’s War Primer’”, noting that this award “applauded the way in which the project pushed the boundaries of the medium, exploring the complex relationship between image and text while drawing on elements from both the past history of photography and the present image economy.” (Guardian, footnote)

Broomberg and Chanarin, who are the first duo to win the Prize, published their tenth book (MACK/AMC), Holy Bible, at the beginning of this month. This new work was conceived, in part, by a chance viewing at Bertolt Brecht’s archive in Berlin of Brecht’s personal Bible, in which he had carefully inserted found images and annotated the text. Inspired by this intervention, and informed further by Israeli Philosopher Adi Ophir’s text ‘Divine Violence’, which draws parallels between the ways in which systems of modern governance mirror the catastrophic punishments meted out by God, Broomberg and Chanarin began to explore the ways in which they could further investigate these themes within their own practice. Using found images sourced from the Archive of Modern Conflict, the largest archive of its kind in the world, the artists’ work revisits their concerns regarding the ways in which we ‘read’ images of war and suffering. Utilising explicit photographs of death, suffering, and sex, alongside snapshots of leisure, magic tricks and illusion, this work comprises of 614 coloured plates overlaid onto text from the King James Bible. None of the original captions accompany the images; rather, the artists have produced their own captions by underlining sections of the sacred text. This new publication encourages an active interrogation of the ways in which we ‘read’ images of conflict.