Grand Palais, Paris
November 10, 2018
Christopher Williams spoke as part of The Exhibition as Medium, a day of talks organized by London-based writer, curator, and artist David Campany during Paris Photo. "Photographic artists often look beyond the single image to the body of work—the set, the suite, the series, the album the archive and the typology," Campany writes in the introduction to the program; "In recent years many have extended this idea even further, into the gallery space, turning the exhibition itself into their medium. . . . The photograph itself is only one part of how they understand their work. At the same time, progressive museums and galleries have developed innovative strategies for presenting photographic material."
Saturday, November 10, 2 PM (part of a ticketed event) Auditorium, Level 1, Paris Photo, Grand Palais, Paris
Williams, whose practice investigates conventions of pictorial production and presentation, has expressed an interest in establishing a more "mobile" position as an artist, alternately acting as "camera operator, picture editor, exhibition designer, graphic designer." "Christopher Williams breaks all the rules," Sean O’Hagan writes ina review ofThe Production Line of Happiness, Williams’s critically acclaimed survey that traveled from the Art Institute of Chicago to The Museum of Modern Art in New York and London’s Whitechapel Gallery from 2014 to 2015; "For a start, some of the walls have been flown in from his recent show in Germany—and the captions on the works are from the Whitechapel’s previous show, Adventures of the Black Square. The confusion these now-random captions cause for the viewer are as integral to the exhibition as the hanging of the prints."