Rhea Storr | The Image that Spits, the Eye that Accumulates | 2017 24.10.2020 – 14.02.2021 | Fotomuseum Winterthur

SITUATION #216

Video still from The Image that Spits, the Eye that Accumulates, digital video, expired Kodachrome 16mm, family photographs, phone footage, 11 min., 2017 © Rhea Storr
Rhea Storr, The Image that Spits, the Eye that Accumulates, 2017, SITUATION #216, SITUATION/Closure, installation view at Fotomuseum Winterthur, 2020 © Philipp Ottendörfer
Rhea Storr, The Image that Spits, the Eye that Accumulates, 2017, SITUATION #216, SITUATION/Closure, installation view at Fotomuseum Winterthur, 2020 © Philipp Ottendörfer

Based on an autobiographical narrative by artist Rhea Storr, the 16mm video work The Image That Spits, the Eye That Accumulates explores the extent to which photographic technologies entrench racist image practices. The London-based filmmaker, who is of British Bahamian descent, uses decaying celluloid films and abstract visualisations of eroding sections of the landscape to destabilise racist attributions within photography. Her Kodachrome films, which are overlaid with grainy family pictures and fragmentary sequences shot on mobile phones, thus centre on the fragility of photographic materiality and a critique of photography as an objective image system as a means to negotiate physical ascription. By revealing the material of colour film as an instrument of discrimination and thus illustrating photography’s violent potential, Storr’s work makes the case, not least, for a politicisation of the photographic image.

More by Rhea Storr: rheastorr.com