‘Each shot feels like a private performance’: Rene Matić, the Turner shortlist’s only photographer

In a deeply personal show called Idols Lovers Mothers Friends, we see the artist’s inner circle – but there are delightful tangents, too, including figurines by the patron saint of mixed-race peopleRene Matić’s nomination for the 2025 Turner prize was announced the week this exhibition opened. Only one photographer has ever been awarded the prize – Wolfgang Tillmans. Matić is not a technically masterly photographer, but a quiet observer of things, like Tillmans. Matić riffs on a documentary, diaristic style of photography, with snapshots of everyday moments and poetic juxtapositions, which are then used to create installations, grouping images to surreptitiously bring out buried tensions and paradoxes. Where those tensions have often been urgent and angry in Matić’s previous exhibitions, this new show highlights another facet of their work. It is perhaps Matić’s most personal exploration yet.Although these installations are evocative slices of life, it’s the whiteness of the gallery’s walls and ceiling that you notice first. Their sharp, stark white engulfs the contrasting small-scale obsidian pictures, scattered across the wall like dark gems on a pristine beach. The whiteness is overbearing and cold, but it also emphasises the lustrous quality of the black-and-white pictures. This plays symbolically into Matić’s concern with the rubric of whiteness in British society, and how blackness lives within, alongside or outside it. Their images describe what many of us mixed-race people in the UK experience as being in-between, something Matić has termed “rude(ness)”. The simple choice, to make the pictures small and place them sparsely on the white wall, makes you experience this “rude(ness)” concept visually. Continue reading...

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