A collection of work by Talia Chetrit riffs insouciantly on themes of life, death, and birth through a variety of visual languages. In JOKE, Chetrit brings together family photos, street photography, still lifes, selections from the artist’s teenage archive, and expansive self-portraits involving a cast of characters who feature as both engaged and unwitting collaborators.
Referencing a wide range of photographic tropes and traditions, Chetrit studies the power dynamics between photographer and subject as they spar and collude. JOKE deals in high humour and deadly seriousness, plunging us into a world in which social roles are inverted, norms are examined, judgements of taste and value are suspended, and everything coalesces, dead and alive, true and false, sincere and affected.
