Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin (former editor-in-chief and associate editor of Benetton1s COLORS magazine) are a photographic team living and working in London. Their work has been widely published in magazines and newspapers including Dazed & Confused, Creative Review, Intervista, IT magazine, Sleaze Nation, The Independent, The Observer, Blvd. and Dutch. Exhibitions include the Florence Biennale, along the Grand Canal in Venice, and at the Atlantis and The Photographers Gallery in London. Future exhibitions include the National Museum of Film and Photography (UK) and TRUST, a solo show at the Hasselblad Center (Sweden). They have been awarded a photographic residency at the Hasselblad Center in October 2000 and at Ex-Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City in December 2000. They are publishing three books of their work with Westzone / Fourth Estate.
• Leora Farber
Born in 1964, Leora Farber is a Johannesburg based artist. She trained at the University of the Witwatersrand, receiving a B.A. Fine Art in 1985 and M.A. Fine Art Cum Laude in 1992. She currently works as an artist and lectures full-time in the Fine Art Department, Technikon Witwatersrand. Her work is included in numerous public and private collections. Recent group exhibitions include Body As Commodity (Atlanta 1999), Emergence (touring SA, 1999-2000), The New Anatomists Gallery 1010 (London 1999), The Exquisite Corpse (London 1998), Colours: Contemporary Art From South Africa (Berlin 1996), FNB Vita Art Now (Johannesburg 1996), The Body Politic (1st Johannesburg Biennale 1995), Inside - Outside (1st Johannesburg Biennale 1995). Solo exhibitions include Instrumental (The Thompson Gallery in collaboration with Read Contemporary Art Johannesburg 1997), Skin - Less (Gasworks Gallery London 1997), Seeing through the Body (Goodman Gallery Johannesburg 1993).
She presents a body of work, comprising sculpture and video, which investigates relations of Western female bodies to contemporary medical scientific practice. The latter’s role in reshaping and altering the body is highlighted, drawing a parallel between the ‘art’ of tailoring a garment to fit a particular body size and contemporary body-reconstruction using surgical ‘craft’ to fabricate an external appearance which conforms to a particular ideal beauty.
• Lynne Lomofsky and Koeka Stander
The making of these videos is a product of the creative confluence of an artist and a cell biologist. Lynne Lomofsky graduated BA from UCT in 1980. She then completed a National Diploma in Fine Art through the Cape Technikon with a distinction in painting. After extensive travels throughout Europe and time in Canada, she is currently completing an Masters in Fine Art at Michaelis (UCT). Solo exhibitions include Recent Work (Koffler-Loggia Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 1992) and the critically-acclaimed CANCER WARD LE:32 (Mau Mau Gallery, Cape Town 1997 and Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery, JHB 1998). Koeka Stander is a qualified cell biologist who has recently opened her own video art and editing studio called Playroom.
Cross Sections I deals with Lomofsky's ongoing self-documented experience of the biomedical search for and attempted eradication of malignancy inside her body. In Cross Sections II, Lomofsky has taken a series of ordinarily static images that medical technology had generated of her body and has brought them to life. The spectator is invited into a sublime, moving morphological landscape which celebrates the hidden beauty of the body's interior. Within the shifting mass -concealed from the untrained eye - is a tumor that flits past at high speed and regular intervals. Beautiful blight.
• Colin Richards
Colin Richards is an Associate Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Department of Fine Arts. He is an acclaimed practising artist, art critic and curator, publishing extensively both locally and internationally on issues concerning South African contemporary art. He completed his undergraduate degree at Unisa and postgraduate studies at the University of London (Goldsmith’s College) and Wits, where he was awarded his Ph.D. He has also taught at the University of Leeds and the Glasgow School of Art. He has a special interest in art therapy.
“ My recent work touches on, amongst other things, the presence of ‘religious’ power and poverty in my cultural environment. Specifically I am concerned with the power of fathers, sons, masculinity and emasculation. The work is multimedia, with a few processes and images recurring throughout. For example, I often include small-scale watercolour paintings (worked in an anachronistically laboured way) with set-up situations in which organic processes – literal germination, growth and decay – occur. I might, for instance, plant mielie or bean seeds in some container (a photographic developing dish, an invalid cup), water these for a period, and then stop. Finally, I frequently use either actual or mediated found material of a heavily sentimentalized but ultimately traumatic nature – like fragments of local funerary sculpture. At present, the most common ‘religious’ image in my work involves some or other variation of the cloth of ‘Veronica’ (vera icona means ‘true image’). St Veronica is the patron saint of photography.”
• Alexa Wright
Alexa Wright is 0.5 Researcher in Photography at the University of Westminster, and Artist in Residence in the Medical Physics Department at University College, London. She is a visual artist currently working with photography and digital media. For several years the subject of her work has been an investigation of the relationship between body and self. She has exhibited extensively in the UK and abroad; particularly in Canada and the USA. In 1995 Alexa was Artist in Residence in Electronic Imaging at Oxford Brookes University. She has taught at a number of Universities and art schools across the UK, and has lectured in a variety of contexts. In 1997 Alexa was commissioned by The Wellcome Trust to collaborate with two scientists to visualise the phantom limbs of amputees in a series of twenty four photographic prints entitled After Image. Drawing upon the genre of portraiture to expand previous investigations of the relationship between body and self, this work visualises phantom limbs experienced after amputation in a documentary style. The work raises many questions around the nature of photographic 'truth', and around the concept of authenticity, for example: which is the 'true' body; that which we see or that which is experienced? In 1998 this work was exhibited at the Ruskin School in Oxford, Regina Art & Science Fair in Saskatchewan, and the ICA in London, where it won Imaginaria, a major new digital art prize.