Andrew Norman Wilson | Kodak | 2018 08.12.2018 – 17.02.2019 | Fotomuseum Winterthur

SITUATION #150

Andrew Norman Wilson, Kodak, 2018, SITUATION #150, SITUATIONS/To look is to labor, installation view at Fotomuseum Winterthur, 2018 © Philipp Ottendörfer
Andrew Norman Wilson, Kodak, 2018, SITUATION #150, SITUATIONS/To look is to labor, installation view at Fotomuseum Winterthur, 2018 © Philipp Ottendörfer
Andrew Norman Wilson, Kodak, 2018, SITUATION #150, SITUATIONS/To look is to labor, installation view at Fotomuseum Winterthur, 2018 © Philipp Ottendörfer
Andrew Norman Wilson, Kodak, 2018, SITUATION #150, SITUATIONS/To look is to labor, installation view at Fotomuseum Winterthur, 2018 © Philipp Ottendörfer

Kodak takes the viewer through the memories and ramblings of a fictional former Kodak film technician. Partly based on the experience of the artist’s father at the company, Andrew Norman Wilson imagines his character, blind and now unemployed, appearing to be gradually losing his mental faculties as he sits at the public library obsessing over the tape recordings that Kodak founder George Eastman made near the end of his life in 1930. As the video unfolds from the protagonist’s point of view, the viewer is left to navigate historical recordings that merge with hallucinatory memories, as well as computer generated images portraying fantastical abstractions based on blueprints of abandoned Kodak factories and engineer’s plans of obsolete machines. Kodak addresses photography’s role in accumulation and preservation of things, materialisation and digitisation, visibility and invisibility, ownership and labour – exploring the friction between the production processes of the company and the powers of the photographic medium on imagination and meaning making.

More by Andrew Norman Wilson: andrewnormanwilson.com

Coproduced by the Stolbun Collection, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Center for Contemporary Art Futura (Prague), KRIEG (Hasselt) and Fotomuseum Winterthur.