I never touched a pigeon is a collective multimedial work dealing with the question of absence and blind spots in expanded photography.
The title ‘I never touched a pigeon’ refers to Johan van der Keuken’s film ‘blind kind’ (1964) and results from the discovery that seeing people are blind to recognize the world in exclusively tactile terms. A blind child learns to call a pigeon by its name through touching the animal as such, a seeing child by sight. In recognition of this lack of knowledge the artist started to explore the borders of perception and the opportunity of relearning to see.
The projected videos refer to this process: Through zooming-in the sight becomes limited, the object’s movement faster and unpredictable. The projection is framed by two ladders. The ladders are leading nowhere, they are proofs of absent functionality and embody the metaphorical gaps between senses and blind spots in perception.
The installation is accompanied by an artist book which offers a fragmented but thickly layered insight into the abstract and complex topic of absence. It can be considered as an interim collection of uncontextualized pieces as placeholders for decisive steps in the process of examining absence. It contains traces of absence, blind spots and parts of the series ‘index of things that are not mine’. It aims not to answer but raise questions and opens spaces for thoughts and associations about the unseen in photography.
I NEVER TOUCHED A PIGEON, 2023
video projection, artist’s book, ladders
currently on view
PROPELLER IV
FOTOGALERIE Wien
17.03.-26.04.2025
The works are the result of a two weeklong residency in the fortress Hohensalzburg in Salzburg led by Ángela Bonadies and Brígida Maestres and were part of the show ‘Capturing the Unseen‘.
