© Rob Kulisek; courtesy of the artist, and VI, VII, Oslo.
Rob Kulisek
pride (rave) part I
2.9.2021 - 31.10.2021
Rob Kulisek’s debut exhibition at VI, VII featured sixteen photographs that depart from an editorial crafted for the magazine Interview Germany’s Pride Fanzine. For this, Kulisek photographed friends dancing and exulting after the 2021 Pride in Berlin, following one year of the Covid-19 pandemic. Produced while Berlin was in lockdown, and shot on a single evening, the compositions in this series are not coordinated, but stem from theatrical scenarios that are loosely initiated by the artist.
© Rob Kulisek; courtesy of the artist, and VI, VII, Oslo.
“Kulisek’s photographs reverberate like a bass drum, and are grounded in a pulsating dialogue with the figures depicted.”
Featuring queer and transgender models, this rave was a way for marginalized communities to reconnect and to regain safe spaces. During one turbulent night, Kulisek is capturing the heat and palpitations. Joy, fear, and sadness coalesce in this series exploring the inextinguishable deployment of human passions.
Through dancing bodies, expressionistic blurs, and the soft associations suggested by gridded panels, the works in pride (rave) part I are infused with a formal tension between movement and stillness. Kulisek’s photographs reverberate like a bass drum, and are grounded in a pulsating dialogue with the figures depicted. By stepping back, he encourages his subjects to thwart the camera’s fetish for containment and capture. As visual vibrations, his pictures convey queerness as a resistance to fixity, or a momentary embrace of fluidity as freedom.
Rob Kulisek (b. Philadelphia, 1989) is an American photographer living and working in Berlin, Paris and New York. His work, which circulates in the worlds of fashion and fine art photography, involves establishing settings and environments in which his subjects can play out improvised scenarios that appear neither staged nor accidental. These simulated moments become the material for a voyeuristic catalogue.
Part of a generation of artists who are questioning porosities between Art photography and Fashion photography and shifting their commercial and aesthetic stakes, his pictures are nourished by his assiduous reading of independent fashion press from 1990s, such as Purple, and Self Service, as well as experimental fashion brands like interdisciplinary studio’s Bless. Nurtured by subcultures that have emerged mostly in the 90’s and the 00’s in the indie-fashion photographic field, a large part of his practice is infused with anti-fashion, grunge, queer and porn-chic.