Deepest Darkest, a Cape Town-based gallery, will be making its European debut with a presentation of work by lens-based artist Barry Salzman from his project 'How We See The World: (a century of genocide)' at Unseen Amsterdam.
For the last decade, Salzman’s practice has addressed issues relating to genocide - its memory, recurrence and future eradication. Throughout modern history, Western governments have repeatedly and consistently failed to act in time to stop perpetrators of genocide. As policy makers and government leaders throughout Europe and the United States continue to reckon with their inaction to stop acts of genocide, notably with the post-Holocaust genocides in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Rwanda, so Salzman’s work asks us to grapple with our role and responsibility as public witness.
In Salzman’s ongoing landscape project, 'How We See The World: (a century of genocide)', he makes works within witness distance of sites of twentieth-century genocide. He uses the landscape metaphorically to draw connections between each of these disparate and dark moments in modern history, while suggesting that in fact it is we, members of an amorphous humanity, who form the true connective tissue between them.
In his large scale landscapes he abandons a traditional documentary treatment in favour of a more abstract approach reflecting his intent for the pictures to be a counterpoint to the way information on this topic is typically disseminated. By creating a “veiled view” in each of his landscape images, typically by moving the camera during the exposure, Salzman critiques the filters through which we consider and remember the past. He hypothesizes that it is our veiled societal view of historical events that continues to upend our unfulfilled collective promise of "never again."
Salzman says of his intricately layered landscapes, all made in a single exposure with no composting in post-production, “In these works, I am preoccupied with making aesthetic images as opposed to documenting brutal facts. By creating these images, my hope is to give viewers the space to interpret the work in their own way.”
To date he has completed work on the Holocaust in Poland and Ukraine, on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, on the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and on the first genocide of the 20th century in Namibia.
In writing about Salzman’s What If The World project, author Ashraf Jamal, in his book Strange Cargo (published by Skira, 2021), writes, “It is his acute awareness of the Janus face of humanity that allows Salzman’s photographs to teeter on the brink of atrocity and grace.”
Barry Salzman, born in Zimbabwe and schooled in South Africa, developed a fascination with photography as a teenager, when it served as a way to grapple with racial segregation in apartheid South Africa. Today, his work continues to explore challenging themes around social, political and economic narratives. Acutely relevant, and brave in its willingness to confront, Salzman’s photography garnered an International Photographer of the Year Award in 2018 from the International Photography Awards (IPA). for his project, 'The Day I Became Another Genocide Victim'.