Curated by artist Eric Bell and Ludlow 38’s curatorial resident Saim Demircan, Exhibition as Image: Art Through the Camera’s Eye presents art documented by artists. These photographic, filmed and sculptural records of exhibitions and artworks counter the conventional high-key documentation that proliferates online today, the result of which is typically the flattening of exhibitions into images.

While this particular effect has had a noticeable influence on recent art production, as well as exhibition-making, Exhibition as Image: Art Through the Camera’s Eye presents alternative and subjective approaches to the production of images of art that could be seen to resist this phenomenon.

In the front space, Judith Barry’s Damaged Goods 3D (2015), previously commissioned for to expose, to show, to demonstrate, to inform, to offer at MUMOK in Vienna in 2015, is re-presented for the first time in New York. Three-dimensional printed dioramas made from installation photos of the 1986 exhibition Damaged Goods at the New Museum – the first survey of artists associated with ‘appropriation’ art at the time, and for which the artist designed the exhibition – reanimate the original documentation images, re-staging some of the ‘object relations’ between photography and sculpture. Damaged Goods 3D are shown together with Barry’s original catalogue essay “Dissenting Spaces”, reprinted on Iris Cloth on Davey Board.

In the back of the gallery, documents and video works by artists play in a looped sequence. The multiple perspectives embedded in the subjective or remixed footage shown within Exhibition as Image: Art Through the Camera’s Eye contrast the static, rectilinear gaze typical of conventional documentation photography.

Shot after the opening of Der Blonde Affe, Eric Sidner’s show at Deborah Schamoni in Munich in 2016, Eric Bell & Eric Sidner’s Fisheye Drift Redux (2017) collapses video material by Sidner onto Bell’s exhibition documentation that he filmed using a 180 degree fisheye lens. Taking the form of a filmic montage, It’s about time (2009) by Dave Carbone & Bernhard Schreiner documents their collaborative piece at the first Caribic Residency space in Frankfurt am Main.

Filmed on U-matic videocassette and overdubbed with a repeated electronic soundtrack by Wily Tieleman, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven’s Komfort Über Alles! from 1980 follows the artist around her exhibition at De Warande in Turnhout, Belgium. Stephan Dillemuth’s video walks through a 1993 exhibition at Pat Hearn Gallery. Based on their research of the 1980s art scene in the East Village, the show was organised by Dillemuth and Josef Strau while they were co-running the former artist-run space Friesenwall 120 in Cologne. The footage includes a visit by the gallerist Pat Hearn to Friesenwall 120 where a parallel show was held.

Mark Leckey has recut an existing promotional video produced by Haus der Kunst for his show As If in 2015 by editing out the talking heads and adding his own soundtrack. The playlist ends with an excerpt of Nora Schultz’s video work, I Am Honda (2015), which incorporates footage taken with a drone during the production of her exhibition of the same name at Reena Spaulings in 2015.

Including works by Judith Barry, Eric Bell & Eric Sidner, Dave Carbone & Bernhard Schreiner, Stephan Dillemuth, Hollis Frampton, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Mark Leckey, and Nora Schultz

Installation by Bryan Osburn and Marc Paradise

Text by Eric Bell and Saim Demircan

Graphic design by Scott Langer and Sunny Park

Exhibition photography by Yair Oelbaum

Curated by Eric Bell and Saim Demircan

Assistant: Julia Weiss

Gallery Assistants: Amelie Meyer and Hiji Nam

Thanks to Georg Blochmann, Kristoffer Frick, Brent Garbowski, Joe Graham-Felsen, Anabel Hogefeld, Michael Sanabria, Joel Schlemowitz, M.M. Serra, and Sara Stevenson