Nina Porter
Liste Art Fair Basel
10–16 June 2024
VIP Preview: Monday 10 June, 11 am–6 pm


For Liste 2024, Nina Porter shows new sculptures, photographs and films with which she continues to dismantle and reconstitute the camera and its processes. The presentation follows her January exhibition, vision on the run.
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The exhibition comprised a pair of pinhole cameras and the photographs resulting from them. These works were characterised by their interiority, the cameras determined by the dimensions of Porter’s bathroom and positioned so as to observe, from various vantages, the domestic scenarios of her apartment in Frankfurt’s Bahnhofsviertel.
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By installing a new pair of cameras in public contexts, Porter now turns their attentions to the outside. Their scales modified towards inconspicuousness, the cameras operate between concentration and distraction, producing long-exposure images with scattered, quasi-omniscient perspectives. The presentation includes 6 photographs resulting from these scenarios. They show starry glimpses of an aisle in Müller or the arcade at Hauptwache, but the specificity of these locations is subdued by the perspectival glut, the referents dissociated and the pictorial anchors roving. Like those in Porter’s exhibition, the new photographs are presented in Perspex frames, each one holding both the positive print and the negative—the latter obscured behind the former (there is, again, one exception). This multi-directionality echoes that of the image.
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The two cameras—one black and one white—lean in the corner of the booth, relegated now to the status of a sculpture. Alongside these cameras and photographs, Porter introduces a parallel series of experimental films, Human Puncture. Each one trains her 16mm camera on a crowd or assembly, yet the individual faces are barely differentiated from the mass. Like the earlier work, Rehearsal (2023), the new films are constructed using a complex matting system which builds an atomised image, one that is gradually consumed by and overridden with its own information. As the picture surges, matter becomes equalised and dissolves.
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The presentation is accompanied by a new publication, Human Puncture.