Abstract

Based on the presupposition that nowadays the real has become elastic, both in physical and conceptual terms, the exhibition Realities and Plausibilities examined the ideological premises of realism and its re-enactment in contemporary photographic art.Making the borders between snatching, reconstructing or even simulating the real indistinct, such practices have, in recent years, acquired novel currency within the wider realm of the visual arts. They introduce a new type of consciousness about photography as a mode of representation, liberating the photograph from the once singular relationship to its referent (the Barthesian “having-been-there” condition) and the presumption of the “moral righteousness” accrued to the “unmediated” real. This is pursued through recent and unpublished photographic work of eleven international artists of Hellenic descent.