Dina Kelberman

Torrent
09.03–10.11.2015
Room 2

Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal presents Torrent by Dina Kelberman in partnership with CLARK.

Beyond the realms of chemistry, Dina Kelberman has invented a particular type of chain reaction, as evidenced in her online project I’m Google (started in 2011): images call to other images in a sequence governed by morphological and semantic affinities that generate a gradual, relentless, never-ending flow.

The nineteenth century brought the compulsive need to stockpile images as a way to control the world – a need attested to by the albums of criminologists such as Alphonse Bertillon and Cesare Lombroso. In the twentieth century, an attempt to understand culture and human experience was added to this compilation obsession, which has been evoked, for instance, in Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–29) and Gerhard Richter’s Atlas Micromega (1962–2013), and – elsewhere on the spectrum – through Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project(1927–40) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975). This continuous thread of dialectical images – that is, images engaged in a dialogue with other images – leads us to Kelberman in the twenty-first century. Beyond speaking, it is a matter of showing: the underlying discourse lies in the infinity of images.

Viewers have sometimes wrongly assumed that I’m Google simply operates with an automated program, “a bot set free on Google Image Search and directed to Tumblr, rather than the selective record of countless hours of looking and sifting. . . . Kelberman’s work exploits a strain in Internet art” that, according to Teju Cole, “challenges the viewer to assume it was made by a bot, not an artist: a kind of reverse Turing test.”1

Among the series of works gathered under the generic umbrella of Torrent, Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal presents two similarly oriented projects: Doors (started in 2012) and Go Outside (2015).

J.F.

1. Teju Cole, “The Atlas of Affect,” The New Inquiry, July 7, 2014, http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/dtake/the-atlas-of-affect/.