Private View & Occasional Performance

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'Private View & Occasional Performance' is a public artwork that uses work from the project 'Dark Rooms'. In the exhibition 'Dark Rooms' photographs are presented conventionally on the walls, this time however the work is compressed, wrapped in bubble wrap and presented as a stack (sculpture) in the gallery. Participants of this project wear white gloves and unwrap the photographs to present an expanded version. The work becomes a photographic public performance that travels through the galleries of DUDSPACE, KINGS ARI and to King street. The participants hold the photographs to the public for an hour a day before the work is returned to Dudspace gallery, where it compresses again into a stack of framed photographs wrapped in bubble wrap as though in a stockroom. The work can be viewed activated by participants or as a stack of photographs resting against the wall in the gallery. Artists who have informed my own making process and relationship to the photographic image in an event and or public participatory performance are Francis Alys, Tom Nicholson, Bianca Hester and Jeremy Deller. This work has become new knowledge in the field of fine art photography because it uses the framed image as an art object differently from the conventional image on the gallery wall. It reflects on religious rituals, processions, parades and political marches where the photograph is presented in the public space as a way to activate images and the relationship that the public has to images presented. The work as an outcome realies on participation as a way of re-thinking the way that photographic images are displayed, stored and presented in a contemporary art gallery context and in the public space. This is the first time that framed photographs are explicitly used within the gallery and in the public space activated through participation in a conetemporary art context. http://dudspace.com/filter/ARCHIVE/Private-View-Nikos-Pantazopoulos