Amin El Dib presents a selection of his photographic works at Skulpturhalle Basel. The presentation of predominantly black and white images alongside the plaster casts of ancient goddesses and heroes provokes a dialogue regarding the nature of images.
Caressing and marring are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Where Amin El Dib’s images embrace the body as subject, only the memory of it remains intact. Photography provides the skin its grainy surface and captures its shadows of wrinkles and hair. Clearly it is a photograph, exposed according to the requirements of its material characteristics. Glaring light conflicts with the tactile promise of warmth and curvatures, highlighting the porous gloss of Baryta paper. In the enlargement and marring, torsos, lips, and fingertips keep alive not only the immaterial simulation of the image but also the actual and existential threat of every breathing body.
Representations are disputable and photography is a medium of uncertainty. Whether portrait, still life, landscape, or travel photography, Amin El Dib continues to develop his body of work fully cognizant of the fact that an artificial texture and ultimately an only indirectly connected reality underlie each and every image. The photographer, born in 1961 in Cairo and raised in Germany, explores in each new series the interrelationship between his motif and its satisfactory reproduction. Earlier imagery forms the basis of the current medium-format, square photographs portraying a generous selection of the plaster casts at the Skulpturhalle. El Dib re-photographed earlier prints and enlargements after folding, tearing, re-contextualizing, recombining or re-exposing them. In collaging images he is less interested in the collision between various reality fragments than in the feel and physicality the images generate. Employing a radical, sculptural approach to the intimacy of portraiture, he succeeds in producing alternative narratives concerning the body, concerning touch and desire.
The artist’s situating of his photographic series temporally in the legacy of classical antiquity is no coincidence: he has been a regular visitor to the Skulpturhalle since 2014, where, in the figures of ancient deities and heroes, he discovered ideal models, so to speak. El Dib is intimately familiar with the more or less visible marks left by the casting process on the three-dimensional replicas. In this regard, the Basel collection echoes his photographic interests in the boundary between what the image asserts and what is lost in this process: the shadows, graininess, seams, and cracks that have simultaneously created and marred his photography since his series Weekenders (from 2000) are also evident in the sculptural works handed down from antiquity. Both photography and the casting process are techniques of reproduction that rely on a negative as an intermediary step. This is another reason why the protagonists in the room call for a visual comparison in such a restrained and precise way. The rib structure of the Hanging Marsyas from the third century BC, for instance, forms a link to the photographic paper, which, folded in several ways, almost painfully discards the smoothness of bodily texture. One would like to connect an eye slanting upwards on the same wall to Diadumenos, whose imposing head can only be surmised. The vitality and fragility of the portrayals balance one another out: it is unclear whether it is the muscular torso in the room or the alert eyes of the image that convey the presence of sensuality, strength, and desire.
Nudity is the leitmotif that weaves it way around the plaster casts and through the construction and deconstruction of the photographed bodies. Bared and shrouded, antiquity speaks of social roles and gender-specific codes — carried forth in the concurrent exhibition Tochter – Schwester – Gattin (Daughter - Sister - Wife) in the form of written commentaries. The ribbon holding together a thin chiton under the breast of a Dancing Mänade is echoed in the photograph in the form of a curving fissure. And just like every image horizon or proud Artemis the Huntress necessarily conjure up a landscape, every organic, wavy form in the photographs, in turn, can be retraced in the delicate folds of antique vestments. To this extent, Amin El Dib is not simply presenting his photography at the Skulpturhalle; his rigorous questioning of the medium of the image also reveals in the ancient figures an innate insistence on life and survival.
Isabel Zürcher, May 2016
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