Shifting Coordinates
The Hive’s newest exhibition, Shifting Coordinates, presents work by international artists that blur the boundaries between race, gender, age, location, and time in photographic representations of identity and the environment.
Globalism, as an international economic and political movement, is made possible through technological advancements in travel and communications, shrinking the world’s geography and minimizing cultural differences. One result is an increased awareness of the randomness of distinct cultural differences—in terms of race, gender, and age—and the social laws governing individual identity. Incessantly projected and perceived onscreen, the self is becoming increasingly fluid and fractured. Photography, experiencing its own shifts in behavior and identity through digital advancements of the past few decades, mirrors and abets globalism’s leveling hand by both documenting specific peoples and places and submitting them to the great charnel house of the internet, where context and image integrity are continually obliterated. The fluid and fractured imagery of contemporary photography illuminates the quest to envision who and where we may find ourselves to be when once-familiar coordinates of geographic, social, and psychological identity are subsumed in a mutable future.
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Image: Katrín Elvarsdóttir (Icelandic), Vanished Summer 14, 2013. Archival inkjet print