BRUNO SERRALONGUE

3/07/10, Jeu de Paume, Paris

Serralongue takes photographs, then blows them up big, of pre-planned news events like conferences and demonstrations. They're shot wide or from unexpected angles, revealing not only the event but also its context, the artifice involved (set dressing, posters, artful repetition of poses etc etc). We saw indigenous people demonstrating in South America (their brightly-painted wooden folding chairs sinking into the mud under a sky of bright blue and fluffy white clouds); we saw the same group of black protesters trekking round a city to display a banner in different locations; we saw press conferences in the cavernous halls in which international conferences are staged... or alternatively in the tiny lecture theatres which are all that's needed to hold the handful of international news agencies that turn up. And there was a sequence of pictures taken on a hazardous environments course in the UK. I recognise this world, and I find his sideways look at it produces intriguing insights, but D I think just found it rather boring. The pictures' impact is reduced by displaying them in sequences, many of which seem repetitive.