17/12/2018 Severine Grosjean
Irene Fenara is a young artist who is interested in different means of expression, including video and photography. She is interested, for example, in the study of photography through the limits of image acquisition technology, Polaroid or scanner. Photography has always fascinated her.
As much in video installations as in photographic practice, Irene interest is always centered on the idea of movement in space and time and in the need of orientation that results from it. For that, she uses images bearing the traces of a movement, reversing the points of view or generating situations of spatial disorientation. She uses disorientation to detach familiarity from what we see, to revisit it from a slightly different angle. She questions what is taken for granted. Irene uses a certain visual sensitivity. Vision is a cultural construct built and learned more and more rapidly in the circulation and saturation of images of our time. The history of vision is inevitably linked to the optical and visual technologies that graft onto our eyes and transform their ability to see and, consequently, to think.
Irene Fenara’s artistic work explores the gesture behind every aspect of photography. She observes, investigates and interprets. In her work presented to art gallery Adiacenze ” Se il cielo fugge”, Irene changes the perception of space. She took possession of the space one after the other, one inside the other. She modified the real space by applying large photos and then she made shots in the modified space to project them on the back wall. The video is a long zoom that traverses the entire space. This opposite and inverted view confuses the coordinates, the point of view is inverted, questioning the spatial orientation and the reference points.
In her work ” Ho preso le distanze,” Irene presents a work consisting of a set of side-by-side, four-leveled polaroids as a Cartesian plane in which the horizontal pattern represents space, and the distances, positioning the photographs from far to nearest. It is an emotional work that is based on science. The project was born and developed from Edward T. Hall’s anthropological studies on the proxemics, which analyzes the distances that mankind gives in communication and in their relations with others in society, and in how they express them. She places under the photographic lens the reading of daily experiences in a new vision. Indeed, she tries to decipher something as abstract as love, affections and friendships thanks to a very precise criterion such as the measurement of space. She became a guinea pig by instinctively photographing friends, relatives and acquaintances, and then, only after taking the picture, taking measurements with a meter. She recorded all distances, dates and times. It is a project closely related to a precise temporality. Indeed, relationships change over time. The coloring of different photographs also shows the succession of different seasons. This installation allows a true multi-level reading of the different aspects that determine the work.
Irene Fenara continues her research on the aesthetics of supervision and control, presenting a selection of images of surveillance cameras saved in a continuous stream which are removed by her every 24 hours. The images produced are often fuzzy, spoiled by a series of errors.
She appropriates the tools of the contemporary world that guide and determine the way we see, even using images from surveillance cameras. An instrument is never a simple technology. This work is disturbing because it presents a world apparently without human being where she seems to be the only inhabitant. She sets herself on the scene absent from human life. She is the only witness. It’s the resistance. She fragments the world by deconstructing visual and spatial perception. “Accepting to be under constant surveillance shows that a new conception of identity is emerging.” (Will Self)
Partnership: The Nomad Creative Projects
