Talal Refit

Every Photograph Is A Farewell, 2005: Talal Refit is an Iraqi artist now working in Germany. The exhibit consists of photographic work printed on unwoven wool, bottled holographic prints on screen and interactive digital projections.These media confronts the centrality of a media ecology in the modern world, which has been made acute for the artist by his status as a political exile whose only contact with his homeland is mediated by images. In placing images on wool, and in allowing the viewer to interact with them in his digital work, Refit seeks to use the surface not only as a culturally appropriate medium but also to shift the viewer’s perception away from the transparency with which images are usually perceived to a slower, more conscious, perception that resists the onslaught of images that Refit notes now serve to define “the fate of nations.” From ArtCal‘s review of Talal Refit’s solo show, With the fate of his homeland in the balance, and the fate of all of our lives so intertwined with the images that help define them, Refit’s work asks us to appreciate and reflect on the mediated world.

“Today our reality is an endless picture composition. Fate of nations are defined with pictures. True or false, pictures turning the wheels of the time. It is a contradiction for a painter today to asshole with this accelerating picture reality. I snap some of images passing me away, and print them on unwoven loose wool surface, damming up the speed and put a step backward to see and feel the time.” Talal Refit