The "Shutter and Spectrum" exhibition draws on two sources: the photographic output of Eadweard Muybridge and the artistic practice of Paul Cézanne. Both of these figures played a key role in the development of contemporary visual culture. The former, thanks to his method of time-lapse registration, analyzed movement, breaking it down into frozen moments. Cézanne, on the other hand, highlighted the movement of human vision in his paintings - incoherent and evasive in the logic of drawing, the images exposed the corporeal nature of looking, revealed the conventionality of perspective and made it possible to define it as a form of limitation of the cognitive apparatus.
The name of the project refers to the title of the 2004 Thai horror film "Shutter." Its plot revolves around the stalking of a young couple by a mysterious apparition in the form of a long-haired woman. The word „shutter” relates to the medium of photography, which is what the main character does for living. And it is the photographic images that are haunted by the ghost with black hair and pale skin. In one scene, the photographer's partner is looking through a pile of recently developed photos of the interior of an apartment and notices that the same translucent figure has been captured on each of them. She quickly flips through the pages creating a stop-motion animation effect. The specter is crawling in a jagged, non-smooth motion, as if in Muybridge's studio works, and then stands still in the last photo.
The presented series of works uses the mentioned aspects of Muybridge's and Cézanne's work to reflect on representations and perceptions of the Other. The works of the former are a kind of montage of the constantly intertwining elements of seeing and not seeing - the stuttering sequences of photographs combine the body movement captured by the shutter with moments that the camera did not capture. Cézanne's still lifes and landscapes point to the hybrid nature of human vision, making visible the stitching of material provided to the brain by the moving eyeball, to eventually appear to us as an image in its patchwork and somewhat monstrous form. Placing these notions of incoherent vision in the context of horror enables resolving the genre’s fundamental tension between the protagonist and the monster understood as a "categorically contradictory degeneration" - a being that is simultaneously dead and alive, dismembered and constituting a disturbing whole. After all, it turns out that the corporeal nature of human perception itself has something of a monstrosity about it - like the apparition in the film "Shutter," it combines opposites: seeing and not seeing, a flash of light and darkness, fragmentation and the impression of coherence. Perhaps this is the beginning of a long way to formulate a postulate to change the perspective on the Other: from the currently prevailing logic of horror to the logic of fairy tales. Then the uncanny will not be only a thing of the monster, but will be also discovered as a characteristic of the audience. For as Carroll writes: "[In the horror film] the monster is an extraordinary character in our ordinary world, whereas in fairy tales and the like the monster is an ordinary character in an extraordinary world.
Sebastian Winkler