The Incomplete Reimagining of Image Matter by Jelena Stojković

There is a set of reproductions depicting hands in Patti Gaal-Holmes’s studio: a film strip from Richard Serra’s Hand Catching Lead (1968), a photographic rendition of a hand’s imprint in ink, a still from Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou (1929), Auguste Rodin’s Main droite de Pierre et Jacques de Wissant (1885-86), several rayographs, and a colour photograph of somebody’s hand holding a mineral. It’s a Warburgian panel of sorts, hanging in an upper corner of the studio, just above the arch-shaped window taking up most of its outer wall, to the right of her desk. For an artist who spends a lot of time experimenting with film and photography, this is not a random arrangement. It is rather a visual reflection on the act of art making, a current of thought that undeniably runs deep in her artistic work.

We can observe it in Gaal-Holmes’s into the frameless distance - city of (no) memory, which is a carefully considered configuration of multiple acts through which images are presented to us – fragmented, superimposed, stitched together, sequenced in sketchbooks and photo-books, projected, unrolling on the wall. These acts are by no means accidental but are deliberate stagings of a zone of encounter with a body of work that decidedly develops over time and is perpetually left unfinished, in a continuous state of incompleteness. Mirroring its key focus, an effort to reconstruct her father’s escape from Hungary in the late 1940s, there is no definitive end or closure to the story that into the frameless distance - city of (no) memory tells. Just as something conclusive starts to take shape, a new trajectory opens, a tangent, and the journey starts again. The suggestive and fragmented nature of this project, its ambiguity and incompleteness, evoke Umberto Eco’s The Open Work (1962), a valuable contribution to the understanding of art as a form of production of knowledge. Eco describes open work in visual art as an ‘epistemological metaphor’, favouring disruption and discontinuity in analogy to the shared experience of the modern world.1 Unbound by any singular, ‘correct’, way of viewing or perceiving, it encourages new ways of looking, and thereby fosters conditions for a renewal and change. Clearly, such an approach to art making is rather appropriate, not only to the unearthing of Gaal-Holmes’s complex family history but also to the time we live in.

Gaal-Holmes often quotes Japanese photographers and critics associated with the short-lived magazine Provoke, active at the turn of the 1970s, as closely related to her own method of working with images. This parallel is most apparent in the preference for analogue, monochrome film, and how it lends itself to experimentation in the dark room

1 Umberto Eco, The Open Work, translated by Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), 87.

as well as in post-production. In its conceptual aim to ‘provoke the world of language and ideas’ Provoke cultivated a recognisable style known as are, bure, boke, or ‘blurry, grainy, and out of focus’.2 It was achieved through a playful practice that involved photographing without looking through the viewfinder or from a moving vehicle, rephotographing, scratching the negatives and alike, in order to destabilise a static and fixed character of photojournalism’s use of the photographic apparatus. Gaal-Holmes’s images undergo a similar treatment, as they are developed and printed in an array of experimental techniques, organised, and reorganised across different formats of presentation and multiple gallery spaces.3 Such a handling of what me might term as the ‘image matter’ – referring to both her films and photographs – also suggests sculptural modes of working. I am reminded of a story about Constantin Brâncusi’s encounter with photography: deeply unsatisfied with the highly stylised and polished manner through which others photographed his work he asked Man Ray to help him procure necessary equipment and give him a couple of lessons so that he was finally able to take adequate photographs, which were all blurred, over- or under-exposed, and stained.4 In Japan, this manner of work is especially relevant to Mono-ha, a radical group of artists primarily interested in materiality that was not unrelated to Provoke in the 1960s and ‘70s.5 For these artists acting upon the material (in such gestural actions as dropping, slashing, suspending, pulling or ripping apart) substitutes the more traditional ways of art making, constantly evolving through phases, or impermanent stages of an artwork that crystalise at the point of exhibiting it.6 What therefore becomes clear is that Gaal-Holmes does not simply make work about her father, and that it is not intended only as a representation but also, at least in equal measure, an objectification of her experience of searching for him. This process is channelled through an active renegotiation of the image matter, which expands from its conventional function as a historical document into a material rethinking of the past in the present.

Jelena Stojković is an art historian and critic and the author of The Impossible Avant- Garde: Surrealism and Photography in 1930s Japan (2020). She is a Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory at the School of Arts, Oxford Brookes University.

2 Takanashi Yutaka, Nakahira Takuma, Taki Kōji, and Okada Takahiko, ‘Provoke Manifesto’ (1968), translated by Christopher Stephens, originally published in Provoke 1 (November 1968): 2, in Doryung Chong (et al), From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan 1945-1989 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013), 214.

3 Within this conceptual and stylistic framework, Moriyama Daidō’s weaving of personal narratives with broader interests in memory and city culture resonates particularly strongly in Gaal-Holmes’s practice. In her reconfiguring of photographic mediation through installation and her interest in both urban and rural landscapes, she also works closely to Nakahira Takuma.

4 As told by Victor I. Stoichita in A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 191. 5 Enokura Kōji is a good example of this crossover.
6 Mika Yoshitake, ‘What is Mono-ha?’, in Reiko Tomii (section editor), Voices of Mono-ha Artists: Contemporary Art in Japan, Circa 1970, Review of Japanese Culture and Society (December 2013), 205-208.

The suggestion of an echo traced by the touch of a capturing device by Ricardo Reverón Blanco

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. Susan Sontag1

Evidence of the exile experience is often, to use Sontag's terms, unfurnished. These narratives map and recount the stories of migration, yet they frequently fall short of fully conveying the harrowing conditions endured. The strategies to share these personal accounts are varied, protracted, and intricate. At this year’s Venice Biennale, Bouchra Khalili’s "The Constellation Series" a part of The Mapping Journey Project presented eight- channel videos focusing solely on a map, as a hand wielding a permanent marker traced in real-time the often years-long, tortuous, and perilous journeys of individuals excluded from citizenship. For millennia, displacement and the journeys undertaken under such dire circumstances have been recounted by countless hands, yet these stories often transform into distant recollections, whose detailed accounts remain an unrepresentable experience.

The projects ‘into the frameless distance’ and ‘city of (no) memory’ by artist Patti Gaal-Holmes, including photographic series, photobooks and 16mm looper projection films, focuses on her father’s escape from Hungary and the artist’s search for traces in the cities and landscapes of his past, that being Budapest and the Bratislava/Austria border. Its aim is simple: to encounter a memory and anchoring its contents photographically, yet the results are complex as these memories flee in a perpetual back and forth. The search for a ‘lost’ father has been wrestled with since the Bible, and one can associate the literary and conceptual links made by the likes of Albert Camus, Paul Auster and Keggie Carew to the contemporary artist, John Akomfrah in The Unfinished Conversation (2012), a dialogue with his intellectual, rather than biological father, Stuart Hall.2 This methodology and practical iterations of methods to capture (photography, film, research, evidence gathering) become a language which Gaal-Holmes uses to fit within this discourse. From the conception of the first daguerreotype, the history of photography has been obsessed with the act of capture. In Gaal-Holmes’ work, we see the inefficacy of recounting the experience of exile and through an obsessive collection of captures, often of the same location, and its slow erasure through its chemical revelation processes.

1 In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations.
2 One can see further references in; Albert Camus, The First Man (1994), Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude (1982) and Keggie Carew Dadland: A Journey into Unchartered Territory (2017). Since its emergence, the photographic process has been inextricably linked to ideas of death and mourning. With the ability to (re)produce moments in the past into tangible objects, photography becomes a medium that affects human’s ability to recollect. In ‘city of (no) memory’ and ‘into the frameless distance’ places and past events are captured as if they were apparitions of the past in Hungary and Bratislava, haunting its borders and being exhumed in the darkroom in order to be materially traced back to celluloid or paper. These processes are more generally informed by experimental photography and film, as well as ‘anti-photography’ works here reminiscent of the Japanese photographers Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira. To recall the past is to look at something that has died: photographs are always depictions of a scene that had ceased to exist. Whether the image shows an immortalised object or a subject that remains alive, the scene in which the photograph was taken quickly perishes with the click of the camera. Roland Barthes, alongside other photography theorists, have pinpointed the inextricable connection between photography and death.3 frame, shooting into light, and working 'carelessly' to delve beneath the surface of an Moriyama and Nakahira's 'anti-photography' projects defied conventional photography rules by extending the image. They aimed to uncover the deeper truths beyond the concrete reality that typical photography manuals might instruct against. Moriyama sought to reveal the 'scars left after the membrane of fake reality is removed,' exposing the essence of existence. His seminal work Farewell Photography (1972) features motifs like breaking the film frame and creating ghost images or completely white negatives, emphasising the non-existence of the copula and exposing reality to light. Similarly, Nakahira believed facing the real world meant facing the light, striving not only to photograph subjects bathed in light but to capture light itself.4

During its development in France, Niepce and Daguerre discovered a way to immortalise images of the camera obscura in 1839.5 As a mystery to many, William Henry Fox Talbot allegedly developed his own calotype two years after Daguerre’s discovery: a photographic process using sensitised paper with silver chloride which was proportionally exposed in light. Another mystery was the science behind these photographic methods, which seemed to many contemporaries a series of obscure magical practices. These attitudes were consolidated by the mystical representations of such processes, where the chemicals used to reveal images are depicted as ethereal mists of residue that are left in the plate at the end of what Niepce would call, the heliographic process.6 Revealing a photograph becomes an act of dialogue and a sudden spiritual touch reveals the echoes of something that has once been lost and is almost brought back to life.

3 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 9.
4 Shimizu, M. (2012). ‘Grainy, Blurry, Out-of-Focus: Daido Moriyama’s Farewell Photography’ in Baker, S, p. 57
5 Helmut Gernsheim, Concise History of Photography, 3rd ed. (New York: Dover, 1986).
6 Joseph Nicephore Niepce, ‘Memoire on the Heliograph’ [Paris, 1833] in Classic Essays on Photography ed. by Alan Trachtenburg (1980), pp. 5–10.

Seeking the elusive traces of Gaal-Holmes’ father becomes an act of self- awareness about the transitory nature of migration and one’s loss of identity by losing the meaning of ‘home’. The artist’s research is thorough, referring to Sandor Marai’s Memoir of Hungary 1944-48 (1996) as he fled in the same year as her father, providing a poignant context for understanding the resolve to leave as post-war Hungary’s conditions rendered life unbearable for many. Marai’s account brings to life the desolation and despair that permeated the post-war country, painting a haunting image of a nation in turmoil. These reflections offer a window into a collective memory of those who chose to flee, driven by political oppression, economic hardship, environmental devastation, and cultural disintegration.

The artist’s research delves into how exile shapes her family’s identity, including her father’s enforced exile from Hungary and the self-imposed exiles of her mother from Germany and the artist’s from South Africa. The project, in various stages of production, encompasses a range of themes. One centres on South Africa, specifically the Liliesleaf Farm Mayibuye (2016) film project, which engages with apartheid and familial histories. Another focuses on her father’s escape, crossing into Belgium from Hungary, and his status as a refugee. It also explores the fifteen years he spent in the Belgian Congo. Each project incorporates film and photography as an anthropological capturing device that retells the story through finding clues to how these experiences shape individuals whilst navigating their journeys. Ultimately, these journeys become an impossible search: a perpetual dislocation.7 At a time when international geopolitical discussions are a starting point for conflict, Gaal-Holmes’ work is a foundational reconnaissance around the importance of land, heritage and one’s cultural identity.

Ricardo Reverón Blanco is an author and curator, as well as the co-founder
of UnderExposed, a photography platform and collective dedicated to encouraging artistic collaboration. Ricardo has worked on a plethora of curatorial projects and publications, including Photoworks’ From Little Acorns – Festival in a Box, Johnny Pitts’ solo exhibition Home is not a Place at Graves Gallery, and Light which was exhibited at Peckham 24 (2021). He is the Curator and Programme Manager at Aspex Portsmouth,

7 Dislocations at Palais de Tokyo brought together fifteen artists from different generations and backgrounds whose work is marked or informed by the experience of exile, of being torn between here and there.