November 2008 Field Guide

William Eggleston

Anton Kannemeyer

The Brussels Dream

Lynne Marsh

Frances Stark

Donald Rodney

Oranges and Sardines

Dóra Maurer

Munio Weinraub and Amos Gitai

Sharon Lockhart

Stephan Balkenhol

Terence Gower

Jacques Bedel

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Dutch artist Renzo Martens has spent the past several years examining the role of the camera in places of severe political unrest, utilizing performance and satire to create metafilms that raise questions about the use of journalism and documentation. For his film Episode 1 (2003), he traveled to Chechnya and, instead of recording the women in line for food, the children in refugee camps, or the heavily armed soldiers, he turned the camera on himself, asking his subjects what they thought about him. For Episode 3, part of which was shown at Manifesta 7 last summer, Martens went to Congo, where he launched a two-year project that examined the exploitation of one of Africa’s major exports: images of poverty and suffering. In a characteristic mix of journalism and irony, Martens erects a blue neon billboard in one of the villages that reads ENJOY POVERTY (in English for the roaming photojournalists who might pass by) while also attempting to launch a program that would allow the continent’s poor to receive restitution for being the poster children for global poverty.

"Renzo Martens" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2008 Table of Contents.