Two years since his dramatic separation from inventive accomplice Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin displays on collaboration, consent, and his new e book
In February 2021, Spanish gallery Fabra i Coats mounted The Late Property: Broomberg & Chanarin – an ostensibly posthumous exhibition celebrating the success of a creative collaboration between Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin which had lasted greater than 20 years, however was now coming to an finish. “The duo have legally, economically, creatively, and conceptually dedicated suicide,” introduced South Africa’s Goodman Gallery on the time. The ‘loss’ of the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize winners, and the following show of their joint property, prompted appreciable dialogue throughout the artwork world – together with an obituary, of types, printed on BJP’s web site. But, over two years later, in a sunlit studio in east London, Chanarin sits earlier than me, very a lot alive.
The photographer is right here to focus on his new e book, A Excellent Sentence, however the inventive “suicide” of his partnership hovers pointedly on the edges of our dialog. Finally, I’ve to ask – how does he really feel in regards to the breakdown of the connection and, on reflection, would he describe its demise in the identical phrases as we speak? “Nicely,” he replies, slowly, “suicide is a resolution, and I don’t assume we made a resolution – the partnership collapsed.”
This frank description is mirrored within the textual content of A Excellent Sentence. In a prolonged, meandering and insightful essay, Chanarin likens the skilled divorce to two small mind cells which, every starved of oxygen, finally wither. “I didn’t know how to be a photographer anymore,” he says, with a shocking air of vulnerability. “How to make the work was actually a thriller to me, as a result of I’d been current inside these boundaries.”
So, in early 2022, when Chanarin set out throughout the UK in search of collaborators to turn out to be half of A Excellent Sentence – a mission impressed by the division surrounding Britain’s exit from the European Union, the stress of Covid-19 lockdowns and the rise of identification politics – his intention was twofold. First, by way of a mixture of intuition and curiosity, the photographer sought to go away behind the structured nature of his collaboration. Second, he hoped to escape the echo chambers of like-minded opinion inside which so many of us can discover ourselves trapped.
