‘Further Reading’ both reconstructs and deconstructs a photography exhibition created by Rami Maymon where objets d’art, images, and spreads from art history books are photographed in various poses and compositions, and integrated amongst various other photographs created by the artist. As a nod to the uncertainty of the medium’s empirical authority, Maymon approaches visual history in sculptural and performative terms, infusing his creative process into the already charged stature of the images selected.
His technique merges existing visual texts with additional worlds of content, referring the reader to materials which are external to the main text; The image, the original and the reproduction are no longer distinct concepts, but rather components in ongoing processes of continual reconsideration, which both reject the privileging of the finished image and situate reappropriation as an act of semantic innovation. Reading the history of art through reproductions, which are traditionally meant to document and preserve past heritage, exposes the dynamic political forces which have facilitated changing ways of seeing.
This edition builds upon this continual translation by collapsing the exhibition into an artist book. The walls of the Museum are transformed into pages, where the viewer zooms in and out of the images, guided by the exhibition’s numerical system, which stands in for the book’s page numbers. In addition, each work receives a new layer of meaning through a series of philosophical aphorisms written by Raphael Zagury-Orly and Joseph Cohen, which deviate entirely from the work’s original context, situating the project as a visual meditation on the many ‘archaeological’ layers of time, genre and space.
