Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, New York

Carl Hopgood, 'Want Company?' 2008 Toilet Roll, Ink Toilet Roll Holder Courtesy of Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, New York

Franko B, Amir Fattal, Carl Hopgood, Shiro Masuyama, Michal Moskop, Yochai Matos, Dean Sameshima, Kyle Trowbridge, Naama Tsabar, Tobaron Waxman

The exhibition explores vulnerability and means of communication in a volatile digitalized world through the prism of a darkroom. The term darkroom is most commonly associated with a workplace in which film and photographic paper are developed to make photographic prints. Nevertheless, the same term is also used to describe a darkened room, sometimes located in a nightclub, bathhouse, or sex club, (aka backroom) where sexual activity takes place.

Darkrooms are losing their relevance in our digital times, when sex and image producing can be found and made easily through the Internet and simple and popular electronic devices. Chat rooms and digital cameras - omnipresent in mobile phones - are providing almost everyone in the western world a chance to have quick and easy sex just as it allows the possibility to make quick and easy pictures and films.

While the effects of employing digital means for sex - and for art - is yet to be fully understood, the current exhibition offers an intimate peek into the work of a young generation of artists, mostly men, giving account of themselves and their surroundings, even when it seems at first gloomy, self-centered or overly narrow. Vulnerability, obsession and sexuality are reconstructed and perceived from the hidden, voyeuristic and secluded area of a darkroom, prompting reflection and a second look at what many would consider indecent. It calls upon an investigation of the darkroom as a structure that is private and lonely while being also a space for experimentation, communication and intimacy.