Dario Belić (HR) / Aljaž Celarc (SI) / Martina Dinato (IT) / Lenka Đorojević (SI) / Jure Kastelic (SI) / Martin Stöbich (AT)
13 February – 25 April 2015

The Copy Paste show focuses on this increasingly significant phenomenon within contemporary photography and features artists who use found photographs as the basis for their work. Use of existing and found photographs is a recognised practice that started developing in the beginning of 20th century; it has long since been canonised in contemporary art and photography. At the turn of the century the art world had finally (and irreversibly) accepted and appropriated new possibilities enabled by the industrial revolution several years before, and had started incorporating the now widely accessible materials of mass production. As a result, collage, photo-montage, assemblage and the ready-made are only a few amongst many processes that have been more or less regularly appropriated in the past one-hundred years within visual arts.

Nowadays, in a world saturated with visual impulses, where each and every individual is a potential creator of images, the obsessive need to produce new images is consequently in decline. In a very post-modern turn, instead of creating original artworks, artists working in the field of contemporary photography increasingly find themselves in the role of editors of found visual material. The exhibition at Photon brings together artists from Slovenia and neighbouring countries who have different formal and conceptual approaches with regard to recycle and re-contextualise found images. They find and appropriate their images from unlimited Internet sources, print media, advertisements or photographs from their personal collections and family albums. Aside from employing classic artistic appropriation, they are also dedicated to assembling and disassembling found images into completely new compositions.

The essay on Copy Paste: The Banality of Image by Miha Colner

Buy the Copy Paste catalogue