Exhibition Review: Max Pinckers- Double Bind
Performance #1 (Los Angeles), from the series Margins of Excess, 2018 © Max Pinckers, courtesy Gallery Sofie Van De Velde
Written by Megan May Walsh
Edited by Jana Massoud
The thread between truth and speculation is precisely where Max Pinckers’ Double Bind exhibition resides. At a time when information is excessively abundant and a universal truth is entirely allusive, Pinckers’ work enters this conundrum by embracing the paradox. The axiom that perspectives are limitless and nuanced will always haunt the gatekeepers of truth, like that of documentaries claiming a monopoly on the truth of its own subjects. In his exhibition, Double Bind, Pinckers reveals this insufferable contradiction by employing a medium of truth, documentaries, to convey just how impossible an objective truth is. He titles this approach: the speculative documentary.
The FOMO Fotomuseum of Antwerp compiles several of Max Pinckers’ recent projects for the Double Bind exhibition, a collection designed to criticize the medium it simultaneously admires. Peering through a documentary lens, a story emerges from each photograph. Each subject carries a myriad of life experiences, a detailed history, and an intricate connection to the world around them. However, pinpointing what the stories shining through the photographs are is an impossibility.
Members of the Mau Mau War Veterans Association, Murang’a Branch, 2019, from the series Unhistories (2015-ongoing) © Max Pinckers/MMWVA, courtesy Gallery Sofie Van de Velde
Who are the two individuals in embrace in Performance #1? Is the embrace a tearful goodbye or an overdue reunion? Are they lovers or friends or possibly even newly acquainted strangers? Why are there several men sitting around a grand table in the Members of the Mau Mau Veterans Association? What are their relationships to one another? Do they share an experience? Are they companions or acquaintances or something in between? The questions could go on and on and the answers are - in turn - endless. Depending on which story is heard and whose perspective is shared, the truth told is endlessly open to manipulation…and spontaneous imagination.
When the desperate search for an objective truth is abandoned, the paradox is upended. Subjectivity rules the perception of reality and imagination runs wild. In this wondrous and liberating new paradigm, each photograph is like a blank canvas for human emotion and reflection. Perhaps the pair in Performance #1 are letting go of a beautiful love story they have each grown out of, or perhaps the woman is embracing her childhood friend after the death of her mother. Perhaps the man with the pistol in Jay J. James is acting out his grandchildren’s favorite scene from James Bond or perhaps he has just found his father’s old pistol after rummaging through boxes in the attic.
While Double Bind fails to offer a singularity of interpretation, it accomplishes something even more radical - it opens up new worlds of endless meaning and possibility. Such a multiplicity creates the space for every individual to encounter Pinckers’ images and feel an intimate connection to the subjects and imagery of each photograph.
FOMO Fotomuseum of Antwerp is a museum of photography in Antwerp, Belgium. Located at Waalsekaai 47, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium, FOMO Fotomuseum currently has Max Pinckers’ exhibition Double Bind on display from November 25, 2021 till March 13, 2022. For more information on exhibitions and events, please visit FOMO Fotomuseum’s website here.
Photo Editor: Chris Zarcadoolas
