Clare Strand

SCREENED - BONN

“Screened” is a new exhibition by artist Clare Strand comprising of six bespoke large-scale, folding privacy screens. A privacy screen can exist in digital and physical forms, both serving to obscure what lies behind, whilst, paradoxically, drawing attention to the very act of hiding. Strand’s new work amplifies this paradox exhibiting these photographic screens, displaying images of the very objects they are concealing.

Spanning a 30-year career, Strand has explored the photographic medium in its many capacities and forms. Since 2012 she has largely set aside the camera, instead branching into painting, kinetic sculpture, fairground attractions, chamber music and most recently AI. Yet she has never abandoned her central questions: what is photography, what does it do and how does it circulate and operate in our fast-moving, digitally-saturated world?

For the exhibition “Screened”, Strand’s 30-year ‘archive’ of work-related materials and ephemera become the artworks - taking the form of cardboard tubes containing photographic prints, her darkroom enlarger, boxes of research and props and piles of magazines, which have featured Strand’s work over her career. Traversing the gallery, viewers navigate between the interface of the photographic image and its hidden three-dimensional referent. Screened is the result of a thought process, without nostalgic reflection, of our tacit relationship to the analogue archive when considering the unfathomable, vast and untethered visual scape of the digital.