Eva Bensasson

Revenants
17th June - 16th July 2004

Eva Bensasson's Revenants is a collection of works involving digitally manipulated photographs, and a large wall-mounted lightbox. Bensasson takes as her source material photographs of gatherings (small or large) of people at a variety of familiar, and sometimes unfamiliar, locations: concerts, festivals, political demonstrations, queues at the cafe, airports, hospitals, railway stations or restaurants - and works on these images digitally or by other means. Removing the figures from a specific scene or, more exactly, highlighting them by filling in their forms with a solid but emphatically flat blackness, Bensasson encourages the viewer to consider issues of selfhood and identity, anonymity and collectivity, the self and the other, presence and absence. Keeping in this vivid form the starkly delineated gestures and "edges" of the body, Revenants proposes that we contemplate how the individual relates to the broader mass, fitting into the crowd or standing apart from it as archetype or unacknowleged participant in a particular historical moment or event.

These works involving the removal of the idiosyncratic traits of individual characters are accompanied by others in which the details of the site at which such people were photographed are themselves erased. Removing the contextualising elements of any given scene throws the individuals involved into a state of studied disarray. Left in a state of disconnection, floating among others similarly disengaged from the now absent scene, these erstwhile purposeful subjects convey to the viewer something comical but also disturbing: their own potential absence, erasure, "de-individualisation" at an unspecified future time.

> Past exhibitions and events at t1+2