Black Holes and Other Inconsistencies
In "Black Holes & Other Inconsistencies", urbanism is portrayed as a movement of isolation.
A stage for the encounter with the everyday, this work calls to our attention that all is flow, all boundaries are provisional, all space is permeable.
The "black hole" reflects a society of dislocation & bewilderment.
At times this work seems to question whether the city as a totality escapes the perception of the individual; whether our experience of place, as a whole, has become an incipient forum of disruptive experiences and expression; whether the movement of information and people and the commodification of cultural forms outlines a unique body of flow and false consciousness.
But at other times it simply proposes that we are no longer mere transients.
"Black Holes & Other Inconsistencies" is a journey of recognition: the city and, in a broader sense, space, as our object of understanding is changing and because of this one needs to find a new critical language that supports it, and a new system of knowledge from which to derive our glossary of life.
In this work there is a permanent ambivalence between poetic-failure and the promise of success.
When Martins summons dialectical strategies, he seems to be operating within the paradoxical conflict of romantic irony.
"Black Holes and Other Inconsistencies" is a project that also explores Martins' obsessive interest in the complex relationship between landscape, photography and reality and its engagement with Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which claimed that there is no such thing as a given reality: things can only exist if and when they are observed.
According to Martins only the "event", legitimises any given space or location.
In "Black Holes and Other Inconsistencies" Martins imbues reality with an unmistakable taste of fiction. The unconscious of this strategy, however, has another more brutal significance: photography makes explicit a dialectic between itself and what it represents.
The evaluation that this makes of the relationship between art and space is neither certain or easy, rather it aspires to achieve a mood of catharsis and reflection.
About Edgar Martins
Portuguese by birth, Edgar Martins grew up in Macau, China, where he published his first novel entitled 'Mae, deixa-me fazer o pino'. In 1996 he moved to the UK, where he later completed an MA in Photography and Fine Art at the Royal College of Art. He has exhibited extensively throughout Asia and Europe and has received numerous awards for his photographic and literary work.
His latest book, 'Black Holes & Other Inconsistencies' was awarded the Thames & Hudson and RCA Society Book Art Prize. He was also recently awarded The Jerwood Photography Prize.
Edgar Martins is currently working with the Gulbenkian Foundation, in the UK, on a performance and installation project entitled "There is no longer a city, there is only a man walking through it".