This ROTOR exhibition explores the photograph’s potential to prompt debate, not necessarily to address ‘how things are’ but to ask ‘what is possible'. Curator Dr Liam Devlin Proposes that the social agency of photographic practices—the photograph’s capacity to provide an autonomous view of the world—lies within maintaining a ‘productive tension’ created by the photograph acting both as a document (of events or moments), while also operating as an image in itself; an aesthetic object to be interpreted.

The call to use photography and art as means to open debate may at first sight seem crazily optimistic. it might even be damned by the label ‘utopian’, in what is a cynical, alienated society characterized by self-interest. Yet, to hold onto a belief in the possibility of a more equitable society is not about building a rigid belief system. On the contrary, it is about creating space to effectively challenge dogmatic thinking and established power relations. The exhibition strives to do this by using photographs as discursive documents; pairing them in such a way that they ‘speak’ to each other, but remain open to interpretation.

Devlin pairs artists and photographers whose work can be linked thematically. Seba Kurtis’s seductive and fragile images from Calais are set in relation to Alex Beldea’s portraits and appropriated images from refugees fleeing the conflict in the Middle East. The everyday assumptions that we bring to photographs when we ‘read’ or try to understand them are challenged by both Richard Mulhearn and Richard Higginbottom’s deliberately ambiguous images. Mulhearn’s images celebrate those moments when we subconsciously slip out of the conventional behaviour expected of us; while Higginbottom’s work is a response to cultural theorist Michel De Certeau’s exploration of the complexity of the modern city, which he describes as a “swarming mass of innumerable singularities” (de Certeau 1984; 97). Finally, Layla Sailor and Sarah Eyre’s work uses collages and gifs to disrupt the flow of clichéd images of female bodies, and to explore the boundaries between objects and bodies. 

We invite you to situate yourself between the images, and to consider, question and debate the themes they explore; becoming a part of the dialogue between them.