A visit to Mexico in 2008 led to an ongoing collaboration between Performing Pictures and the Talleres Comunitarios de Zegache. This phase of their work has also seen an increased attention to the patterns of human movement associated with economic migration and religious pilgrimage. Sometimes, in the migrant’s dream of a final return, the separation between these secular and sacred patterns dissolves. The crossing of these lines — vertical and horizontal, temporal and spatial, secular and sacred — marks the spot on which these pictures perform their enterprise.
The exhibition by Geska Brečević and Robert Brečević at Centro Fotográfico Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Oaxaca featured a series of video installations and photographs and glassworks from the current phase in Performing Pictures work that mixes pinhole camera and stop motion techniques into "motion picture paintings". Using a pinhole camera, 4x5 inch paper negative and a scanner, a stop motion animation is recorded image-by-image with long exposures and unpredictable diffractive light properties of moving 3-dimensional objects and rugged textures.
Before the opening of the exhibition, a presentation of the book The Crossing of Two Lines – a collaboration between Performing Pictures and British writer Dougald Hine was presented. The book is both a document of Performing Pictures' work with venerative artefacts and a reflection over its significance in different social contexts seen from a personal view. From the Croatian island of Rab to the pueblo of Zegache in Oaxaca, Mexico, hundreds of colour photographs chart the making and use of venerative artefacts and mixed media. Meanwhile, in a series of texts—one essay, four interviews, ten short poems—we trace the intersecting lines of personal and collective experience which meet in this work.
The exhibition ran from 28 September to 26 October 2013.
Press coverage:
"The crossing of two lines microfilmes en movimiento" Sintesis, 26 Oct, 2013
"Imágenes en movimiento, en el CFMAB" Noticias, 3 Oct, 2013
"The Crossing of Two Lines at CFMAB" El Jolgorio Cultural 1 Oct, 2013
