There Will Be Others

There Will Be Others began as a conversation between M and K. The title did not mean that there would simply be other artists in the show, but that there would always be photography: a medium that continually replicates itself and refuses to go away. Unlike painting, photography’s position may change, but its validity is rarely questioned in the same way.

The conversation considered photography and painting as media associated with pre-modernity and skill, and the idea that both can appear dead or half-dead within contemporary conceptual art. Photography, however, may be able to relinquish its history more readily than painting and operate as a catalyst rather than a final medium.

There Will Be Others referred not only to additional artists but to other positions. The exhibition grew from an earlier discussion with Jeremy Akerman, Paul O’Kane and Tina Hage at Lo and Behold Gallery, opening new points of entry for Magda Stanova, Karl Larsson and Thorsten Schneider.

The frequency of digital image-making has created new freedoms in printing, multiples, montage and retouching, while also producing a vast field of images of uneven quality. Photography can sit anywhere: with art, documentation, the internet and the everyday. Placement and context can transform the same image into a work of art.

The idea of photography’s afterlife displaced the here and now without requiring agreement that the medium was dead. More precisely, this was the afterlife of the original conversation: an evolving curatorial process that resisted completeness and allowed visual and verbal positions to continue changing.

The artists were invited to bump into one another, reflect, create friction and antagonism, and form an uncomfortable harmony. The exhibition was held together not by a single curatorial or aesthetic ideology, but by a conversation that remained fractious, disjointed and incomplete — one in which the artists could deflect, antagonise and disrupt.

Artists: Jeremy Akerman, Paul O’Kane, Tina Hage, Thorsten Schneider, Magda Stanova and Karl Larsson.

The accompanying publication featured contributions from Jeremy Akerman, Tina Hage, Karl Larsson, Paul O’Kane, Thorsten Schneider, Magda Stanova and Duncan Wooldridge.