Resistance Relapse:
Nico Krijno

—
photo access Gallery, Manuka Arts Centre

Nico Krijno, 2023

Exhibition Overview

Nico Krijno is renowned for his work in staged photography, collage, and video, all employed in a performance-based style that challenges and redefines the traditional boundaries of the photographic medium. Krijno investigates contemporary visual codes, symbols and patterns, as well as the history of the image.

Resistance Relapse explores a world constructed explicitly for the camera, not merely mirroring reality but conjuring an imaginative fabrication. Time doesn’t follow a linear path in this realm but is stretched and scrambled. Boundaries, far from being rigid, are instead improvised and perpetually fragmenting. The supposed restrictions of the medium become an engaging playground for exploration and reinterpretation as they blur and morph in Krijno’s hands. Resistance Relapse explores not only these methods of creation, but the spaces in-between.

View Catalogue Here

Exhibition artist

Nico Krijno

With a background in theatre and experimental video, Nico Krijno (b. 1981, South Africa) works at the blurry intersection of photography, collage, painting, sculpture and performance. Probing the thresholds of each, his work materialises through a stream of unique and colourful abstractions that not only act as autonomous pieces of art but when seen as a collection, Krijno’s obsession and constant intrigue into the perception of photographs becomes decidedly evident.

Often working with discarded materials found in his immediate surroundings, he interprets and re-imagines them to find alternative structures for how meaning and matter are both constructed and perceived. Photographing these ephemeral structures, as he describes himself, are a private and physical performance, with the camera being the audience. Importantly, the act of photographing these theatrical scenes is only one part of Krijno’s work. Through an array of digital tools, he then re-imagines the materials, colours and forms countless times until our understanding of each photograph is constantly being challenged, always failing to remain still.

View artist profile

Upcoming exhibitions

LUCKY ROCKET:
Yani Clarke

—

LUCKY ROCKET follows Yani Clarke’s return after the 2022 floods, revisiting Bun Bang Fai rocket festivals to explore place, ritual, and resilience.