We have great pleasure in presenting a preview of Sarah Dobai’s most recent projects, namely a set of photographs [1] and a film [2].
Some of the images are documentary photographs of locations in shopping malls– passageways, corridors and staircases – while others were taken in a studio, using models. The actor/models in the studio are pictured in sets specifically constructed to echo the architectural qualities of the documentary photographs. The shop windows are perceived in their double reality, as "display" zones where a "theatre of consumption" is played out, and as transparent glass plates that the eye traverses, or on which it captures the kind of "reflection" that Walter Benjamin associated with cinematographic effects. The models are photographed in settings that make up a universe in parallel to that of the shopping centres. As in Robert Bresson’s films, these actor-models are shorn of personal characteristics, their poses suggesting the brevity of their passage.
Dobai’s film, Nettlecombe (2007), though far removed from the urban subject of the « Studio / Location Photographs » similarly reflects on the relationship between realism and theatricality. Shot in a day in an 18th-century Somerset park, this is a complex orchestration of rustlings and movements of foliage created by the action of the wind, and it takes place in an amphitheatre of greenery. But the agitation of the trees and bushes, whose forms are accentuated by film lights, was in fact produced by wind machines and ropes. The artificiality of this illusion of wind is made increasingly apparent as the film progresses. As Dobai says « I saw the wind as an image of time itself playing across the photographic stillness of the garden »
Born in 1965. She lives and works in London.
2008 Artist’s residency at the Récollets, Paris
Solo exhibitions (selection)
2009
Works I Projects, Bristol
2006
"Sarah Dobai : Photographs & Filmworks", Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK
"Short Story Piece", Changing Role Gallery, Naples
2005
"Short Story Piece", 1 000 000 mph project space, London
2004
"What we talk about when we talk about love", Galerie Zürcher, Paris
2003
"Two on a Party", ArtLab, Imperial College, London
2002
Artists’ Space, New York
Group exhibitions (selection)
2009
Nettlecombe featuring in "Figuring Landscapes", international touring show of film and video work from UK and Australia. UK galleries include Tate Modern, Dundee Contemporary Arts, FACT Liverpool, Site Gallery, Sheffield (catalogue)
"Theatres of the Real", Antwerp FotoMuseum, NL (catalogue)
2008
"In the Society of London Ladies" with ARTLAB, Fiona Banner, Ellen Cantor, Margarita Gluzberg, Sarah Jones, Elizabeth Price and Bridget Smith. Dispari Dispari, Reggio Emilia, Italy, curated by Arnaud Desjardin
"Limited", group show with Bettina Buck, Lohan Emmanuel, Mark +Harris, Peter Lloyd Lewis and Lisa Penny, Wharf Road Project, London
2007
"Innocence and experience : Carolina Raquel Antich, Corinne Day, Sarah Dobai, Jenny Watson", Gimpel Fils, London
2006
"Portrait of a Citizen, 75 Years of Collecting", Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia, Canada
Chelsea College of Art and Design, UK
