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 Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin 

Adam Broomberg (born 1970) and Oliver Chanarin (born 1971) are an artist duo living and working in London. Broomberg and Chanarin are also Visiting Fellows at the University of the Arts London.

Work
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin explore the topics of documentary photography in their artistic practice. Their work questions the representation of war and conflicts in the modern world and offers an alternative gaze on these topics.

Major Projects
People in Trouble Laughing Pushed to The Ground The Belfast Exposed Archive occupies a small room on the first floor at 23 Donegal Street and contains over 14,000 black-and-white contact sheets, documenting the Troubles in Northern Ireland. These are photographs taken by professional photo-journalists and ‘civilian’ photographers, chronicling protests, funerals and acts of terrorism as well as the more ordinary stuff of life: drinking tea; kissing girls; watching trains. Belfast Exposed was founded in 1983 as a response to concern over the careful control of images depicting British military activity during the Troubles. Whenever an image in this archive was chosen, approved or selected, a blue, red or yellow dot was placed on the surface of the contact sheet as a marker. The position of the dots provided us with a code; a set of instructions for how to frame the photographs in this book. Each of the circular photographs shown on the previous pages reveals the area beneath these circular stickers; the part of each image that has been obscured from view the moment it was selected. Each of these fragments – composed by the random gesture of the archivist - offers up a self-contained universe all of its own; a small moment of desire or frustration or thwarted communication that is re-animated here after many years in darkness. The marks on the surface of the contact strips – across the image itself – allude to the presence of many visitors. These include successive archivists, who have ordered, catalogued and re-catalogued this jumble of images. For many years the archive was also made available to members of the public, and sometimes they would deface their own image with a marker pen, ink or scissors. So, in addition to the marks made by generations of archivists, photo editors, legal aides and activists, the traces of these very personal obliterations are also visible. They are the gestures of those who wished to remain anonymous.

The Prestige of Terror
The Prestige of Terror is the title of a pamphlet written by the Egyptian Surrealist George Henein and published in Cairo, in French, several days after the dropping of the atomic bomb. It was not a thesis so much as a manifesto, in which he re-affirms his distaste for fascism, describes this moment in history as the worst day in the career of humanity, in which the ally’s have come to resemble their antagonists. Henein despised the politics of compromise, ‘The Lesser Evil’ as he called it. The Prestige of Terror was a rejection of racism and murder as a justification to win a democratic war. Our exhumation of the egyptian surrealist movement began at the Townhouse Gallery, Cairo in May 2010. Over the course of their short and sweet life, the 'Art and Freedom' group, as they were known, prepared just five exhibitions and published two editions of a magazine, ‘la part du sable.’ It is difficult to say what led to their premature end. What we do know is that the egyptian surrealists spent much of this short period eloquently describing their own demise. Still, on december 22, 1938 when this group of precocious painters, poets, journalists, and lawyers published their manifesto, “Vivre l’Art Degenere,” They were brimming with optimism. With their stand against order, beauty and logic, the 'Art and Bread’ group, as they later became known, shook up a community steeped in academicism and the picturesque with their particular version of modernism. Herein was a remarkable moment when surrealism in an odd alliance with marxism met the orient. True to their spirit, this exhibition will run backwards, with the 6th ‘Art and Freedom’ show opening on the closing night: may 12th, 2010. Until then the gallery space will be dedicated to the production of new works, which will be added to the gallery walls each day. This exhibition will coincide with the publication of the surrealist magazine 'La Part du Sable,' which breathed its last breath after its second issue in 1941. In this way, the third issue, planned around the theme of violence but never realized, will finally see the light of day. These events will take place without the consultation of any founding members—all of whom are deceased.

Afterlife
The Afterlife series offers a re-reading of a controversial photograph taken in Iran on 6 August 1979. This remarkable image, taken just months after the revolution, records the execution of 11 blindfolded Kurdish prisoners by firing squad. The image, which captures the decisive moment the guns were fired, was immediately reproduced in newspapers and magazines across the world. The following year it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and for the next 30 years its author was simply known as “Anonymous.” Only recently has the photographer’s identity been revealed as Jahangir Razmi, a commercial studio photographer working in the suburbs of Tehran. He was located and interviewed by Joshua Prager of the Wall Street Journal. Broomberg and Chanarin sought out Razmi, and based on their discussions and along with an examination of the neglected images on the roll of film Razmi produced that day, they present a series of collages–an iconoclastic breakdown or dissection of the original image – that interrupts our relationship as spectators to images of distant suffering.

American Landscapes
American Landscapes, takes the interiors of commercial photography studios across the United States as its ostensible subject. The artists reject the foreground and highlight instead the space in which images are literally “made.” In these occasionally abstract photographs the surfaces of walls, floors and ceilings junction along straight lines and parabolic curves to create the unspoiled white space known in the photography industry as Cycloramas. Broomberg & Chanarin refer to these spaces as ‘scenography for a free market economy’ or simply ‘Landscapes’. For just as the American West came to represent unbound possibility in the minds of early pioneers, so these studio walls act as a blank screen on which any sort of fantasy may be projected.

The Day that Nobody Died
In June of 2008 Broomberg and Chanarin traveled to Afghanistan to be embedded with British Army units on the front line in Helmand Province. In place of their cameras they took a roll of photographic paper 50 meters long and 76.2 cm wide contained in a simple, lightproof cardboard box. They arrived during the deadliest month of the war. On the first day of their visit a BBC fixer was dragged from his car and executed and nine Afghan soldiers were killed in a suicide attack. The following day, three British soldiers died, pushing the number of British combat fatalities to 100. Casualties continued until the fifth day when nobody died. In response to each of these events, and also to a series of more mundane moments, such as a visit to the troops by the Duke of York and a press conference, all events a photographer would record, Broomberg and Chanarin instead unrolled a seven-meter section of the paper and exposed it to the sun for 20 seconds. The results - seen here - deny the viewer the cathartic effect offered up by the conventional language of photographic responses to conflict and suffering. Working in tandem with this deliberate evacuation of content, are the circumstances of the works' production, which amount to an absurd performance in which the British Army, unsuspectingly, played the lead role. Co-opted by the artists into transporting the box of photographic paper from London to Helmand, these soldiers helped in transporting the box from one military base to another, on Hercules and Chinooks, on buses, tanks and jeeps. In this performance, presented as a film, the box becomes an absurd, subversive object, its non-functionality sitting in quietly amused contrast to the functionality of the system that for a time served as its host. Like a barium test, the journey of the box became, when viewed from the right perspective, an analytical process, revealing the dynamics of the machine in its quotidian details, from the logistics of war to the collusion between the media and the military. The Day Nobody Died comprises of a series of radically non-figurative, unique, action-photographs, offering a profound critique of conflict photography in the age of embedded journalism and the current crisis in the concept of the engaged, professional witness.

Ghetto
This is a journey through 12 modern ghettos starting in a refugee camp in Tanzania and ending in a forest in Patagonia. In each of these places, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, as editors and photographers of COLORS magazine, methodically documented their inhabitants, and asked them the same questions: How did you get here? Who is in power? Where do you go to be alone? To make love? To get your teeth fixed? For many of those photographed it was their first time in front of a camera. Some looked into it with a hard, penetrating gaze. Others obeyed the ritual of photography with smiles. And Mario, on the cover, turned his back on the camera and waited for the shutter to click.

Chicago
Everything that happened, happened here first, in rehearsal. The invasion of Beirut, the first and second Intifada, the Gaza withdrawal, the Battle of Falluja; almost every one of Israel's major military tactics in the Middle East over the past three decades was performed in advance here in Chicago, an artificial but realistic Arab town built by the Israeli Defence Force for urban combat training. Chicago is published by SteidlMACK in conjunction with a solo exhibition at The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. With the support of Arts Council England.

Fig
Fig. features over eighty still lives, portraits and landscapes by photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, drawing together newly commissioned work made around the south coast of England and internationally, and traces links between photography, imperialism and the colonial impulse to acquire, map and collect. The publication’s diverse imagery harks back to an era of Victorian collecting, which resulted in strange accumulations of objects being deposited in local museums throughout the UK. As Broomberg and Chanarin have observed: ‘the history of photography is intimately bound up with the idea of colonial power. Documentary photographers today have a worrying amount in common with the collector/adventurers of past eras. As unreliable witnesses, we have gathered together ‘evidence’ of our experiences and present our findings here; a muddle of fact and fantasy.’ The images range from strange objects found at the Booth Museum of Natural History, Brighton — such as a merman’s body and a unicorn’s horn — to ancient waxworks and a dodo skeleton; from floral arrangements found in the rooms of Hotel Rwanda to a single leaf blown from a tree in Tel Aviv by the blast of a suicide bomb. Elsewhere, pictures of beacons along the South Downs — designed in the sixteenth century to warn of invasion — suggest a geographic and emotional boundary between Britain and the rest of the world. "At a glance, this book of photographs and texts, with its quirky leaps from one theme to another, may appear to be a darkly humorous trawl through some outer reaches of oddity: fake mermen, obsessive egg collectors, big-game hunters, and those who numerically classify their collections of soft porn. The eccentricities of its arrangement are matched by those of many of its subjects. Yet the misapplication of control and classification systems regularly produce graver consequences that run through the book, a deeper pulse below the whimsy and amusement: in it, animal bodies are measured and displayed, human bodies—living and dead—are similarly dealt with, whether they are female models of different colourations, or giants or the remains of ‘natives’. Also, at the extreme, that depictions, especially in photographs, may be used to complement the type of classification— ‘Tutsi’, for example, written in a passport—that brings death on its subject. In conversation, Broomberg and Chanarin have said that, despite many horrific photographs of genocide, racialised mass killing still continues, and this book points to the other side of that remark—that because of depiction, it continues. - Julian Stallabrass.

Red House
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin have photographed marks and drawings made on the walls of a fading pink building now known as the Red House. Situated on the slope of a hill in the town of Sulaymaniyah in Kurdish northern Iraq, it was originally the headquarters of Saddam's Ba'athist party. It was also a place of incarceration, torture and often death for many of the oppressed Kurds for whom the cell walls were the most immediate outlet for expression. Broomberg and Chanarin approach photography as a form of conceptual ethnography. Much of their work has been concerned with the gathering of visual data relating to matters of human behaviour, often in places of political tension. Stylistically, they avoid the overtly creative, opting instead for a pared down, formal approach bordering on neutrality. They have no 'signature style'. For them the world is a set of highly coded surfaces or stages of action. The camera is used to isolate these things, to cut them out for interpretation and reflection. Their camera usually looks at the subject head-on and centre frame, raising the promise of immediacy or 'plain speaking'. Indeed photographically their images tell us quite a lot about what things look like. However the directness of their photographs is offset by the indirect and uncertain status of what it is they select and present to us. What are we to make of these marks made by Kurdish prisoners? They are unlikely to be the free and uncensored expression of the oppressed, given their surveillance by guards. Most of the marks are images, not words. Some figurative, some are incomplete and abstract, others are suggestive but illusive sketches. Some of it seems like fantasy imagery, some of it looks like the bored marking of time. We cannott tell what marks were made when and in what order. History presents itself as a palimpsest. If you wish you can sense in these photographs echoes of Brassai's surrealist images of scratched grafitti from 1930s Paris or Aaron Siskind's photos from the 1950s of daubs and tears made in hommage to abstract expressionist painting. But the context is more pressing and more fraught. The traces recorded by these photographs may relate to past events in the history of the Red House but nothing is settled in Iraq yet. While the photographs are fixed forever, these may not be the last marks made on these walls - David Campany.

ALIAS
Note: In May 2011 Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin guest curated the Krakow Photomonth. They took Alias as their theme and in the catalogue texts below they outline the guiding ideas for the project: INTRODUCTION Every artist featured in this exhibition is fictional. Twenty-three writers (of fiction, fact and medical history) were commissioned each to create a text describing an invented persona, which was then assigned to a visual artist to inhabit. The work that accompanies these texts is the result of each individual artist’s residency in their fictitious character. It’s an experiment that was set up to fail, because it shouldn’t be that easy to stop being yourself; to break with your own particular political and ethical concerns. Yet most of the artists we approached took up the challenge enthusiastically. ‘We never disembark from ourselves,’ complained the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa in the first pages of The Book of Disquiet. We wanted to give everyone the chance to do exactly this: to disembark. Pessoa’s concept of the heteronym is central to the project. He famously inhabited over 240 different personas, authoring their novels, poems, essays and works of literary criticism. His heteronyms, or what he called his ‘non-existent acquaintances’, unlike pseudonyms, had fully developed biographies: each had an invented history and writing style that was distinct from its author and from one other. In an age in which artists are increasingly driven to present themselves as commercial brands, we wanted to offer some resistance, and Pessoa’s heteronym provided us with just this mechanism. This strategy is nothing new in art practice, and so the second half of the book is a glimpse at some of the artists who have already deployed it. These artists have all created fictional others, or fictional institutions, or simply decided to inhabit an alternative version of themselves. This has allowed them to explore issues such as sexuality, gender, race or political repression in ways they could not have done otherwise. Yet fictional artists appear to suffer from many of the same anxieties as real ones do. They are equally prone to self-publicising – a portrait of Duchamp’s Rrose Selavy adorns the label of a perfume bottle. They have a tendency to be whimsical; to succumb easily to bouts of paranoia; to be overly fond of collage. They do not always tell the truth about where they or their ideas originate. Like real artists, they like to travel but prefer not to think of themselves as tourists. Still, the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño’s fictional anthology, Nazi Literature in The Americas, showed just how helpful the fictitious persona could be when exploring moral and political territory too terrifying to explore honestly in our own skin. We hope some of this work has the same sense of urgency. P.S. Bob Dylan plays a character called Alias in the film Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, but he doesn’t say much.

Solo Shows
2012

Portable Monuments, Galerie Gabriel Rolt, Amsterdam

Poor Monuments, Paradise Row, Dusseldorf

2011

Poor Monuments, Paradise Row, Dusseldorf

Broomberg & Chanarin present: Dora Fobert, Paradise Row, London

Broomberg & Chanarin The Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

People in Trouble Laughing Pushed to the Ground, Paradise Row, London.

Broomberg & Chanarin Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne.

2010

Prestige of Terror Townhouse Gallery, Cairo.

Afterlife Galeria Spafiska, Krakow, Poland.

2009

Ficciones Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa.

Broomber/Chanarin Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris

The Red House Musee de l’Elysee, Lausanne, Switzerland.

The Red House Brancolinigrimaldi, Rome, Italy.

2008

Fig. Impressions Gallery, Bradford, UK.

The Day Nobody Died Paradise Row, London, UK.

Fig. FotoFreo, Freemantle, Australia.

2007

Block 180 Brancolinigrimaldi, Rome, Italy.

Ghetto Photomonth Festival, Krakow, Poland.

Fig. John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, UK.

2006

Facts, Fictions and Stories Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Chicago Q Arts, Derby Photography Festival, UK

2005

Defying Distance National Portrait Gallery,London, UK.

2004

Mr. Mkhize's Portrait The Photographers' Gallery, London, UK.

2003

Trusting The Truth The Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa.

2000

Trust The Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, Sweden.

Group Exhibitions
2012

Critical Dictionary, WORK Gallery, London

Prima Materia, Belfast Exposed Gallery, Belfast

Drawing Show, Paradise Row, London

Advance/ ... Notice, Goodman Gallery Johannesburg, South Africa

Hijacked III: Contemporary Photography from Australia and the UK, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth

Out of focus: Photography, Saatchi Gallery, London

Of the Ordinary, The Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, Philadelphia

Machines for Living, Yaffo 23, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem

Lines of Control, Cornell University’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art 2011

Moments of Reprieve: Representing Loss in Contemporary Photography, Tallinn Art Hall Gallery

Decisive Moments: Uncertain Times, Gallery TPW, Toronto

Collatoral Damage, CUC Centre, Liverpool

Seeing is believing, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin

Summer Show, Galerie Gabriel Rolt, Amsterdam

Eat Me, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town

Alias, Krakow PhotoMonth

Light II, Galerie Gabriel Rolt, Amsterdam

History Painting Now, Art Sensus, UK

All That Fits: The Aesthetics of Journalism, Quad, UK

Antiphotojournalism FOAM photography Museum, Amsterdam.

Serious Games Wissenschaftsstadt Darmstadt, Germany.

Anti-Photography Focal Point and Beecroft gallery, UK.

2010

Antiphotojournalism La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona, Spain.

Chicago Home Works V, Beirut Arts Center, Lebanon.

Bringing the War Home Impressions Gallery, Bradford, UK.

Afghanistan Wolverhampton Art Gallery, UK.

Le Garage International Photography Festival of Arles, France.

The Marks We Make The Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa.

Gongoozler Grand Union, Birmingham, UK.

2009

Manipulating Reality Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy.

Crisis: Exercises in State of Emergency Villa Ichon, Bremen, Germany.

Prune: Abstracting Reality Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography Aperture Foundation, New York, USA.

Miami Basel The Goodman Gallery, Miami, USA.

Art Basel The Goodman Gallery, Switzerland.

Prospekt Gammel Holtegaard Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark.

The Past in the Present – Questioning History Dutch Photomuseum, Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Embedded Art Akademie der Kunst, Berlin, Germany.

La Terra et Nous La Cite des Sciences et de l’Industrie, Paris, France.

2008

The Sublime Image of Destruction The Brighton Photo Biennial, Brighton, UK.

La Terra et Nous La Cite des Sciences et de l’Industrie, Paris, France.

The Photographic Portrait in the 20th Century Fondazione Ragghainti, Lucca, Italy.

Zoo Art Fair Paradise Row, London, UK.

Echo Wanted Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris, France.

Mini-Israel and Bambi Screening at The Gate Cinema, London, UK.

East Wing VIII The Courtauld Institute, London, UK.

Sleeping and Dreaming The Wellcome Trust, London, UK.

2007

Block 180 The Hospital, London, UK.

Zoo Art Fair Paradise Row, London, UK

Paris Photo Steidl, Paris, France.

Zelda Rubinstein, A Group Show Paradise Row, London, UK.

On the Wall Aperture Foundation, NY, USA.

2006

Ecotopia: the Second ICP Triennal of Photography and Video NY, USA.

Global Cities: the 10th International Biennale of Architecture Venice, Italy.

1+1=3, Collaboration in recent British portraiture Freemantle Arts Centre, Australia.

The Face of Madness Palazzo Magnani, Italy

New Photographers 2006 Museum voor Fotografie, Belgium.

Unsettled Durban Museum. South Africa.

2005

Unsettled Reykjavik Museum of Photography. Iceland

Unsettled The National Museum of Photography. Denmark

Unsettled Kristanstads Konsthall. Sweden

Ghetto Aranjuez. Photo Espana, Spain

2004

History in the Making Circulo de Bellas Artes, PhotoEspaña. Spain.

2003

Stepping in and out: Contemporary Documentary Photography The Victoria & Albert Museum, UK.

2002

It's Wrong To wish On Space Hardware Gardener Art Center, Brighton University, UK

2001

In A Lonely Place The National Museum Of Photography, Film and Television, UK.

Broomberg & Chanarin