Talia Chetrit
MANIC PANIC
Oct 11th – Nov 9th, 2024
Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf
Sies + Höke is pleased to present New York-based photographer Talia Chetrit’s (*1982) sixth solo exhibition at the gallery.
“Below are some fragments of an essay I wrote about a film, which Talia violently cut up. The tried and true Dada/punk strategy of slicing, rearranging, and appropriating, brought out themes in my writing about another artist that are very much present in Talia’s own work. The gesture collapsed time, intention and authorship, themes which are also at the core of Talia’s work. In taking photographs, Talia finds reality and works with it in order to shape it, to turn it around, see it from another perspective. Film and photography are perfect media with which to draw out the surrealism, incongruity, and misaligned sense of temporality already present in daily life. Sometimes we have to cut to connect.”
Sara Magenheimer
I was totally immersed in the premise, once I realized that the young female protagonist was encountering her own mother at her current age, as if they were twins, and riveted to see how the magically impossible idea would play out.
I feel like it's accurate to say that she uses the medium to show reality as it is, full of depth, complexity, mutually contradictory moments and glitches in temporality. I sense that what people call "sci-fi" are the moments pushed past our defenses into the questions many are secretly wondering:
How would it be to play with your mom if she was your age? What would you do for fun? If you told her you were her daughter from the future, how would she respond? Would it be creepy or nice to meet your recently deceased grandmother again, but suddenly much younger, and get to do one last crossword together? Why did your mom mention that she made a fort in the woods before having that operation?
There's no big conflict, just massive investigations. The drama is internal. We make monuments to the dead. We memorialize past moments of our lives with mark making and object making. We construct and inhabit totems to our memories. Watching a film is like floating through a memory palace, both alone and collectively. Movies are living monuments to a shared reality, no matter how far the film apparently diverges from reality. Within the diegesis of the film is reality: a real film. I still feel hungrier, thirstier, …awakes a recognition that there are so many not-yet-made films in which I long to live. It is that divine restlessness that only the best art can provoke, akin to the French word troublé for which there’s no exact English translation (troubled, disturbed, with sticky, persistent, nearly erotic undertones.)
