Pictures that breathe life into

this Year's Hasselbladpristagare investigate photography opportunities

Oscar Muñoz is an example of almost all the great contemporary art is local. In his case, it is about Colombia, and the political and historical layers that shaped what the country means today. Or rather, there is violence, enabled one of the world's most unequal societies.

It is about a violence, that fact Aliento among other things, lets appear through the air we breathe. Round mirrors are set in a row, when I stop for the third and quiet breathing out the face of my own reflection in the mirror shows a different face, from an obituary. This way to allow the viewer to temporarily breathe forth a spirit from the past characterizes Muñoz method, and what he does with the question of the photographic.

Rather than invoking the dogma that all the photographs must be read in their context, involves the he viewer's body in the way in which the image is induced. The effect is that I'm forced to ask myself, if not the photographic portrait is indicative of a human life which cannot be reduced to its context, but which must be understood in relation to my life, right there and then in the gallery space. This is not a return to a naive view of photography, indexikalitet and a performance to the viewer through the photograph will be in direct contact with the past. Rather, it is a way to artistically portray the restriction in the notion that every work of art must be read with the basis of a society that the viewer is in any sense a distance to the.

in Short, Muñoz may be an artist working with Colombia's many historical and material layers, but it does not mean that a viewer in florida who never even set foot on the southern part of America beyond this local environment.

another way in which Muñoz lets the viewer become something more than just a viewer at a safe distance from their objects is in golvinstallationen Ambulatorio. Here are encouraged to walk around the glassed-in other countries those parts of the cities where drug-related crime carried out. For each step shatters the glass up. The image changed and distorted the more I try to understand what it really represents.

Oscar Muñoz is one of this year's Hasselbladpristagare, and it is an excellent choice. For while many studies of photography opportunities in the day is occupied with the importance of digitisation, responds to Muñoz speculative installation art, in a world where most photographs are not even produced by a camera. It is a photograph that no longer can only be understood in its context – but how the images actually work.

the hasselblad award 2018

the Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, sweden

3 February