Sarah Dobai's Photographic Works at Kettle's Yard

Thursday, 11 May 2006 12:02

Cambridge, UK - Kettle’s Yard presents the first major solo show of British artist Sarah Dobai in the UK.  Coinciding with the end of the artist’s two-year residency award at Delfina Studio Trust in London, this exhibition draws together photographic and film works made during this period; a new, specially commissioned, two-screen film installation; and several key earlier pieces.

The show explores two central themes in Dobai’s recent practice; the artist’s interest in the city as a social and sometimes political space, and her ongoing engagement with the problems of depicting the interior lives of her subjects.  Within these broad themes, other concerns surface, from the relationship between the still and moving image, to the quotation and manipulation of painterly, photographic and literary genres.

Sarah Dobai’s work taps into a tradition of realism within contemporary photographic practice that resonates with current debates around the status and nature of documentary photography.  Her images seek to depict contemporary lived experience through the dramatic potential of a seemingly naturalistic photographic image.  Exhibition from 27 May to 9 July, 2006.

‘Short Story Piece’ and the two photographic portraits which make up ‘Two on a Party’ (2003) reflect the artist’s ongoing interest in the relationship between text and image, drawing in particular on the genre of the short story as used by American authors such as Raymond Carver, Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers.

Concerned with the often ambiguous relationship between psychological and actual reality, her images explore the social, physical and psychic interaction between subjects and spaces.