Tejal Shah and Shumon Ahmed
Unsuspending Disbelief
Logan Center Gallery, The University of Chicago
Unsuspending Disbelief questions the notion of a straightforward relationship between the photograph, what it pictures, and what it “means.” The exhibition’s repeated images of rainbows are an analog to the values we invest in photography. Light phenomenon without inherent meaning, photographs come to be embedded with an elaborate set of meanings, their ubiquity giving rise to a veracity that then is understood as resolute. Foregrounding the conventions and rhetoric of photography, the artists included in Unsuspending Disbelief undermine photography’s legitimization of hegemonic forms of desire and its naturalization of the “real.” Drawing on traditional categories of picture making, from portraits of a beloved, to documentary and architectural photography, this exhibition considers strategies of recontextualization that displace the authority of the camera’s gaze. The exhibition features the work of eleven contemporary international artists, including Yamini Nayar, Mickalene Thomas, Paul Graham, Ren Hang, Thasnai Sethaseree, An-My Le, Gauri Gill, Matthew Connors, Tejal Shah, Shumon Ahmed, and Lidwien van de Ven. Curated by Laura Letinsky, Professor in the Department of Visual Arts.
