WHAT PHOTOGRAPHY AND INCARCERATION HAVE IN COMMON WITH AN EMPTY VASE
Edgar Martins

15.09 — 12.12.2021

Vernissage: 14.09.2021 18:00

Edgar Martins


The exhibition entitled What Photography and Incarceration Have in Common with an Empty Vase, presents a multifaceted body of work developed from several collaborations of the artist Edgar Martins with Grain Projects and HM Prison in Birmingham. Using the social context of incarceration as a starting point, he explores absence as a philosophical concept and tackles the status of photography when confronted with questions of visibility, ethics, aesthetics, and documentation. By giving a voice to prisoners and their families and by approaching the prison as a set of social relations, rather than as a container of physical space. Thus, the work challenges and rethinks the kind of imagery normally associated with incarceration. Thus, the project deliberately circumvents images whose sole purpose, according to Edgar Martins, is to confirm opinions on crime and punishment already in effect within the dominant ideology: violence, drugs, criminality, race. Through the works presented at this exhibition Edgar Martins elaborates an approach that reinforces the act of photographing and photography as apotropaic devices.

Fiche d'artisteArtist file

Edgar Martins * 1977 in Evora (Portugal), lives in United Kingdom

Edgar Martins’ photos are the result of a theoretical and scientific investigation of different modes of conceptualizing the urban landscape. He alternates the fictional and the factual, the metaphorical and the real, using very skilful montages to produce images where different streams come together, collide and succeed one another in a landscape of uncertainty. For OSMOSCOSMOS, Martins presents The Poetic Impossibility to Manage the Infinite, a series of photos taken at the Euro [...]

Edgar Martins’ photos are the result of a theoretical and scientific investigation of different modes of conceptualizing the urban landscape. He alternates the fictional and the factual, the metaphorical and the real, using very skilful montages to produce images where different streams come together, collide and succeed one another in a landscape of uncertainty. For OSMOSCOSMOS, Martins presents The Poetic Impossibility to Manage the Infinite, a series of photos taken at the European Space Agency about, among other questions, microgravity, telecommunications, navigation and the lunar and Mars exploration programmes.


Exhibition view


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