Talia Chetrit

Nov 17th, 2016 – Jan 14th, 2017
Kaufmann Repetto, Milan

The exhibition is comprised of new works and a small selection from the artist’s archive. Chetrit re-contextualizes these past
works by combining them with recent images, bringing into focus certain subject matters that remain consistently considered
throughout yet stand subject to continued reinvention by the artist.

In Chetrit’s photographs, themes of power and control are personified by the inherent employment of the camera’s shutter. The

artist uses her own self, as well as both consenting and unsuspecting subjects, to explore the complex dynamics that develop
on either side of the lens. Her invitation for the viewer’s participation in personal and intimate moments, like in Untitled (Kiss), is countered by that very decision to make the private public. Through a closer consideration of Chetrit’s past and
present photographic series, viewers may recognize an ongoing push and pull of her own intentional vulnerability. Chetrit’s
fervent focus on sexuality brings an attention to the rigid innuendos of intimacy by challenging the viewer’s perceptions of
pornography, voyeurism and objectification.
Within this exhibition Chetrit includes a wide variety of images, among which she combines a number of self-portraits
alongside photographs of pre-teen girls. This combination suggests a universal understanding of maturation and its inherent
permutations of sexuality. In Ever (Swing) and Daphne (Foot) the youthful subjects speak to the transitional affects of independence
versus adolescence. Their discreet sensuality is indicative of our own postulations. Still-lives of everyday objects become
equally subject to our own suggestive perspectives.

This relationship is expounded through works like Hand Shadow and
Plastic Nude. Both images portray the female figure in paralleled poses with legs splayed towards the viewer. The first, an allusion to our enigmatic gravitation towards girlhood; the latter, a self-portrait in which the artist has positioned herself at once fully nude and fully covered, dressed in a transparent, plastic suit. This dichotomy becomes demonstrative of the autonomy of the female nude and its innate irreducibility. It is through this resurfacing and reinvestigation, that we are able to gather Chetrit’s ongoing interest in the staged versus the
candid as a mirror of our own circuitous relationship with external influence and provocation.

As Sahra Motalebi wrote in her essay accompanying Chetrit’s exhibition in New York earlier this fall, “It is through these
openings that we see the artist repeatedly demonstrating her submission to her own process as an act of authorial agency.”

About Talia Chetrit

New York based artist Talia Chetrit (*1982) explores what remains hidden in the practice and mechanisms of photography.

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