At Das Institut für Alles Mögliche.
This is a curatorial project by Australian artist John R. Neeson that presents a collection of images of objects discarded in the street by anonymous participants in the life of the city.
Neeson habitually records these ‘found’ arrangements on a smart phone and frames them as socio-political signifiers within the context of the ‘readymade’ and ‘the still life’. The networking capability of the digital device enables this repositioning to take place within the broad egalitarian, transitory, socio-cultural dialogue of Instagram.
For the project the images are displayed on small digital screens that share the simulacrum of reality that characterises social networking, while their placement within the architecture of the installation corresponds with the unconventional points of image capture enabled by the compact phone/camera.
Each image is displayed for a longer time than scrolling usually permits which enables more sustained scrutiny. This can reveal that discarded objects are often deliberately composed which can provoke speculation upon the narrative of their placement. The images record the objects as artefacts and evidence of events and interactions within the contemporary urban environments.
