As the biennial FotoFreo Festival hits our city’s southern port town, the magnitude of this magnificent showcase is such that dear old Fremantle simply can’t contain it. That’s why a series of exhibitions are taking place elsewhere in the metro area. Alex Bradley’s 0=2: The Mirror & The Knife – a fantastic voyage into the secret parts of the body and the uncharted heart of nature – is one of these exhibitions. Through a combination of human and plant cells, film stills, photograms, x-rays, text and diagrams, Bradley highlights the cultural losses and desires evident within the microscopic probing of science. She speaks here about the theory behind 0=2: The Mirror & The Knife.
Can you describe the role of science and cinema in your work?
In my work, I use the cinema screen as a trope for what is social, as opposed to scientific. The idea that we look at the cinema screen in order to stabilise our identity has been around since the 70’s, and ‘looking’ in cinema has been theorised and complicated ever since. However, science is a domain still being dissected in terms of its cultural knowledges, i.e. something ‘scientific’ still usually passes as ‘fact’. In my photographs, the microscopic voyeurism of science reveals only the social self.
Are we, as a culture, obsessed with voyeurism? If so, how do you play out this obsession through your work?
Voyeurism has two meanings for me, one to do with our constant and obsessive looking at images (i.e. photographs, cinema, television) and the other to do with looking at the sexual (i.e. looking at porn for sexual gratification). I am disturbed by the sexual denial/display binary that is at the basis of the divide between these categories. I want to display what is hidden in that first category, in photography, television, and film – that we look to know and name the ‘other’ and therefore ourselves. That this cultural activity is an obsessive attempt to stabilise identity.
How do you relate to your finished pieces?
I look back at them as ‘creations’ beyond by control and find I encounter them in a non-intellectual fashion, as very sensual and colourful images whose meaning, in the end result, eludes me. I guess I’m saying I react to them bodily, through that elusive, non-determined body.
0=2:The Mirror & The Knife opens at the Spectrum Project Space on Thursday, April 3 at 7pm and runs until Sunday, April 20.
