Soledad Senlle Gallery Sloterkade 171 1059 EB Amsterdam Pays-Bas
By making installations, using projections and photographic sculptures, Doina Kraal creates a world for the viewer to step into. An ephemeral world comes into being in which recognizable elements, such as everyday objects and ordinary situations are brought together with seemingly impossible and unusual ideas.
For her first solo exhibition in Amsterdam, Kraal got into her grandparents and great-grandparents photographic archives. Photography seems to serve well as a pure way to represent reality. It shows us that, which is visible to all of us, the uppermost, most accessible layer of reality. Tourist photography is in the first place more a process of confirmation rather than of discovery.* The tourist gaze might be seen as insignificant or even banal, but because these photographs were taken in an unconstrained, ingenuous and sincere way, they are very suitable as material for new images. Also, some photographs and slides are so old that they started to lead their own life, colours and lines have faded and the images are no longer the snapshots they once were.
The archives are full of holiday photographs, which play an important role in the exhibition. Kraal has made a selection by isolating certain elements of the pictures to thus place them in a new context. Through the assemblage of different realities, uncommon, artificial surroundings come into existence, which are nevertheless recognisable as the world as it appears to us.
Several mountain landscapes have been brought together in a wing stage-like installation and through this juxtaposition they form a new complex landscape; a theatre for your head. In many pictures, taken in villages and cities, strangers have been photographed unintended. These 'Extras' are unaware of being in a picture and they are absorbed in thought or in action. They have been cut out and placed in a new environment.
In this exhibition Kraal explores the perspectives from which you can look at the world.
* Peter D. Osborne, Traveling light: photography, travel and visual culture, Manchester 2000, p 79