We are holding private 8mm film screenings as well as talk sessions by the curator and artists. These events are appointment only.

*Finishied.

In front of us here is a photo.

A bus, a back view of its driver, a road gently curving to the left, an opposing vehicle of the era; imprinted on here is a scene from the past, with what could be described as a slight searing of sunburn. Where exactly is this?

Born in 1970 in Saint-Etienne, France, K-NARF had his first serious encounter with photography at the age of fifteen. He was immediately drawn to the task of developing, ie using one’s own hands in the darkroom to fix images. Burning images onto a medium preserves them for future generations, and in doing so he discovered the joy of creating something with his own hands. He has never been without a camera since.

Yet as K-NARF himself readily admits, he is not a “photographer” in the usual sense, but simply an “artist” who plays with photography.

On acquiring his first digital camera in 1996, K-NARF was amazed by the vibrancy of the images, and the incredible convenience of the equipment. Simply send the data, and the same image could be “generated” countless times at the click of a button. The images he had painstakingly extracted singly with his own hands in the darkroom, were now duplicates piling up in his printer tray.

K-NARF’s works are produced using an idiosyncratic, “neo-analog” bricolage technique the artist calls TAPE-O-GRAPHY. Digitally-generated, reproducible images are modified using K-NARF’s distinctive technique, which incorporates playful happenstance into the process. In the meticulous, individual nature of this working process, K-NARF’s offerings recapture the one-off dignity of reality in the here and now.

The formation of a duo with Japanese artist SHOKO in 2014 signaled a new stage in K-NARF’s practice. Works made using TAPE-O-GRAPHY began to extend beyond the realm of the stand-alone to become “projects.”

This project, titled “8mm AWAY FROM KYOTO”, began in 2016 when the pair stumbled upon some 8mm film in a second-hand camera shop in Kyoto. The 100 or so rolls packed into two cardboard boxes had been shot by multiple families during the late 1960s and early ’70s, probably at weekends, or while on holiday.

Two young sisters in flotation rings, a hazy island far on the horizon—such are the records of an everyday that unmistakably once existed, but remains unnamed.

In 2020 K-NARF & SHOKO started a project using TAPE-O-GRAPHY to convert to art these “ordinary” images from unspecified sometimes, once left decaying in boxes in a second-hand camera shop.

Now, in front of us is a work of art.

A bus motors through rolling hills, over the driver’s shoulder a scene from the travels of a family whose name is now lost. Here we have an “extra-ordinary” artwork just 8mm away from the here and now in which we live, new life for the future breathed into it courtesy of artist duo K-NARF & SHOKO.