Kent Klich

We are very happy to celebrate the opening yesterday of the exhibition Gaza:Photo Album by Kent Klich at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg. Kent will be showing another work Children Of Ceausescu with us opening on the 20th of February. What both these works demonstrate is the critical role photography can play in documenting atrocity and simultaneously showing us the most personal glimpses of everyday human life.

In the Gaza:Photo Album exhibition Klich has over a number of months photographed the sites at which Palestinians have been killed since 2008. Each image is accompanied by the name or names of the dead, their profession and what weapons were the cause of death. This information Klich put together with the help of The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and the combination is dramatic in its simplicity. The immensity of the tragedy of the war is made visible one death at a time, one destroyed house after another, one more name and one more family in mourning.

The images are presented in book form as a family album, but with the people removed. Many of the shots are very beautiful but there is no way any sense of aestheticism. Rather the beauty of the images allows a greater sense of intimacy between the viewer and the scenes of death. The richness of the work, its visceral overload is a mirror to the absent lives of the missing subjects. Klich has said that the next stage of the work is to interview the surviving members of each bereaved family about the loved ones that have been killed. By doing this, to add the ‘real’ stories of these people, not their political identities but their family stories. In this way the attempt is to further explicate the personal histories of the dead rather than see them as nameless victims.

The cynicism or alternatively realism of Stalin’s famous quote that “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic” stands as a media truism. What Klich attempts to do, is to dismantle the objectification, mediation and alienation of the Palestinian war and insist on the actuality of lived experience where family stands at the centre. The list of 1,414 names of people killed in Gaza since the Israeli offensive from December 2008 to today is more than tragic. That more than three quarters of those dead are civilians and over three hundred children just compounds the sense of outrage that we might have. Klich’s work demands our attention and the painstaking care of his practice and the integrity of his way of working place him in the forefront of socially engaged art practice. We are therefore very excited to be hosting a show with him later in the February.

http://www.kentklich.com/

http://www.hasselbladfoundation.org/news