aberrant
In his latest exhibition, Aberrant, Christopher Köller departed from a purely photographic art practice to make his first foray into the seductive domain of digital photomedia.
Comprised of a series of short films and photographic portraits, Aberrant re-enacted five documented cases of ‘abnormal’, compulsive behaviour performed by individuals through their bodies within conventional domestic spaces. Implicit within these behaviours, which are otherwise disparate and individualised, is their common motivation—it is only via the ritualised performance of certain actions that their protagonists seem able to achieve a sense of normality. Thus in Spike a war veteran habitually puts himself ‘into a trance’ by literally pinning medals to his chest; in Shrink a man counteracts his conviction that his penis is slowly retracting into his body by binding himself; and in Loop two men share a fetishistic and implied sadomasochistic relationship incorporating the multitude of socks littering their home. Photographs featuring the subjects from the films have been shot out of sequence so that we are given another point of reference in our understanding of them.
Köller exhibited these confronting images in a space that mimics a domestic interior, thus heightening the viewer’s initial sensation of intrusion and discomfiture with the incongruity of this pairing. But the artist does more than simply juxtapose the bizarre with the banal. He forces the viewer to question the way in which aberrant behaviours are perceived and represented in art and the media. He does this by ostensibly placing his subjects within the disaffected framework of documentary media (through the use of film and text) while simultaneously and subtly subverting our perception of their ‘otherness’ by drawing us into a sympathetic connection with them through the