aziz + cucher

From the Interiors series.

"In an early discussion of their series of photographs titled Interiors featuring walls, corners, entrances, stairs, and columns lined in skin, Aziz + Cucher refer to the phenomenological experience of turning inwards that leads to ‘ a sense of disorientation and identification’. Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first person point of view. But here the turn inwards that reveals something disorientating or unexpected is not limited to the viewer. Discrepancy and reversal is built in to the work. The viewer’s experience emerges from an encounter with the work – and exchange of information. The image presents an entirely uncanny situation: living skin transposed onto architecture; the human grafted onto the inhuman. The compositional strategy in Aziz + Cucher’s work involves making an image stand for a state of mind. The equation is based on substitution, whereby the artificial interior situation is modelled after an organic interiorised state.

Though the epitelial surfaces of these floorscapes have been readically altered by photo manipulation techniques, the scars, acne, eczema, and irregular lines of exposure, old age, and poor hygiene are left – or rather made- visible. Counter to the cover girl priniciple of using an airbrush or Photoshop to conceal blemishes, in Aziz + Cucher’s Interiors the skin’s irregularities are brought into the open and even enhanced. This series of photographs neither promoted the proverbial beauty ‘skin deep’ nor does its skin imagery celebrate choice formal or compositional characteristics. Neither as beauty revealed through a process of concealment, nor as beauty concealed beneath the surface, this is not a work about beauty; rather the skin is here as a stand-in for what lies deeper, namely, the self. This anomalous scenario of applying the human exterior to build interiors and making the skin stand for something that can never be revealed involves a poetics of contradiction, a paradoxical form of metonymy. Contradition is so much a part of this project. The inside is made of an exterior, the self is made an other, the outside becomes enmeshed within, and the body becomes enmeshed with its surroundings. Like an animal that can camouflage itself in its natural environment, the artists have described the Interiors to be about a subject “incapable of demarcating the boundaries of its own body…[a subject] lost in the immensity that surrounds it”.

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