Interrogating The Expected: Companion Pieces from MoMA

December 9, 2023
Posted by ARTLEOVE

MoMA(The Museum of Modern Art) has added its New Photography exhibition series, a new one called Companion Pieces.

Each week, from September 28 through November 2020, MoMA will introduce a new artist’s work in the online exhibition displayed on its website. The collection is free for everyone.

Companion Pieces brings together recent work by eight artists working in the United States and abroad: David Alekhuogie (American, born 1986), Özlem Altın (Turkish and German, born 1977), Maria Antelman (Greek, born 1971), Iñaki Bonillas (Mexican, born 1981), Sohrab Hura (Indian, born 1981), Dionne Lee (American, born 1988), Zora J Murff (American, born 1987), and Irina Rozovsky (American, born Russia, 1981). It has already published five artist’s work of 8.

In our current reality of frequent looking online

The artists achieve to touch its audience in the exhibition by establishing a bond between the recent past/present and online/offline. We got used to looking at images that link or accompany each other on screens in the endless possibility of the online world. The transition process of digitalization has accelerated in 2020, thanks to the pandemic.

Although MoMA says, “This exhibition was conceived well before the pandemic forced us inside, physically isolating us from one another, compelling us to connect through our screens. We’d already become accustomed to how links thread one image to another through clicks,” to come up with that idea in this particular moment makes more sense on the audience side.

Each artist challenges the expected rhythms and presentations of images we have seen enough in the last years, especially the physical ones! “In realizing this exhibition on moma.org, we once again experience physical artworks—whether sculptural objects or framed prints on paper—as digital scrolls of images. And in our current reality of frequent looking online, we are eager for their companionship.”

In the exhibition, you will also find that the artworks are not just exhibited through images and texts but also explained by artists’ sound records.

With the beginning of the 80s, the institutions and galleries interested in and perceived photography as contemporary art.” The main channel for contemporary photography at MoMA was the New Photography exhibitions,” says MoMA. Typically, the New Photography exhibition has been taking place in New York since 1985. It is the first time in the history of New Photography exhibitions that it takes place only online. Is it just because of a pandemic or in harmony with the idea of linking images and interrogating the expected one? It seems both of them.

You can go to the exhibition with this link.

Enjoy!