Awareness and Reality

In their series The Replacements, young Czech art couple Barbora Zurkova and Radim Zurek reflect upon the relationship between identity and portrayal, original and copy. Featured are digitally reworked analogue photographs of children whose mimic and gesture exhibit astonishing similarity to that of movie stars’ and other prominent figures’. What is real and what is artificial in these images? Can personal and irreplaceably unique physical features exist in today’s world? In the age of digital image production, global social networks and genetic research blur the former lines of identity. It poses contemporary questions, discovered by the arts as an exciting field for experimentation. The artistic couple, which has worked with the theme of identity for quite a while, touches upon precisely that irritating point that lies between original and copy. It is no longer distinguishable to the viewer where the line between true and false lies. The children could be unknown, close relatives of the famous figures – as if they had similar characteristics only by chance. These similarities are especially astonishing in that they come from the world of adults but are carried over onto the children, bringing the consciousness and knowledge of the viewer into question, as one normally tends to think in clear categories of real or fake. Did photography once guarantee a moment of truth, or at least an unavoidable moment in reality? Here, all certainty is erased. Reality is replaced by an artificial medium. What we see are the mirrored images of our own awareness and reality, saturated by media.

Stephan Reisner