Abstract

"By making impact at different times in history – from the 1950s documentary photographic images of magnetic fields and sound waves, to today's artificial intelligence (AI) – the exhibition directs attention to how technological developments enable different ways of approaching reality.

The exhibition is based on documentary photographer Berenice Abbott's images of scientific phenomena from the late 1950s and early 1960s. Abbott was driven by a desire to portray and explain his contemporaries. She staged photographic experiments and in the images presented in the exhibition we get to take part in the innovative scientific environments and materials of the time.

We move forward two decades in time when the Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson worked on his photographic journey into the human body. His images were ground-breaking and came to have great international impact. Nilsson's visionary ambition gave people the opportunity to study for the first time something that had not previously been possible to see, such as the development of a fetus before birth.

The interdisciplinary research collective Forensic Architecture represents the contemporary in the exhibition. By exposing violations of human rights with the help of new techniques and methods, in an age of "alternative facts", fact-gathering becomes crucial as a counter-weapon directed against the falsehoods being spread.

At Abbot, Nilsson and Forensic Architecture, it is reality that is in focus, by making visible what is not visible in different ways. In the exhibition's "project room", a number of contemporary ways of using visual techniques are presented to depict both what exists and what has been digitally constructed with the help of AI. The perspectives introduced invite a critical look at some of the innovative techniques of our time and the images created today. What comes into view are both opportunities and dilemmas that technological development brings and questions that arise in its wake."

https://vbm.se/utstallningar/#18189