Reconfiguring - An Exhibition of Photographs

Reconfiguring.

The Banana box, that ever-present packaging material, mandatory when packing up a life, shifting house and moving on, provides the framework for the Shutter Room’s next exhibition “Reconfiguring” by Sarah Kippenberger and Chris Schreuder, from March 27 to April 20, 2019.

A gallery filled with banana boxes, carefully stacked and arranged; like shipping containers at port, or Lego blocks on the lounge floor. Every box has come from somewhere else, moved from one country to another... retaining the whispered remnants of other stories, other lives.

The artists have taken photography off the wall, by creating a new wall: a moving, changing, malleable wall, one able to be reconfigured at will. They give each box its own personality, its own story, alluding to the myriad complexities intrinsic to the human condition.

Yet it is the continuously changing relationship of each box to each other, and to the greater whole, that hints at the heart of this exhibition. The viewer is invited to participate in this reconfiguration.

The groupings are temporary, impermanent, ephemeral; their configuration at any given moment is as fleeting as our time on earth. Change occurs all around us, and we are compelled to un-box and re-examine, to find alternative perspectives, to turn baggage into luggage... or have we just gone Bananas!