Hoarding

Plattform24, group exibition Kunsthalle Appenzell
Appenzell, CH   





2024

Installation, extruded aluminium profiles and cast aluminium connectors, polycarbonate panels, laser prints on paper, wooden mounting wedges, 488×304×34 cm 
  


  
With high quality standards and at the same time small size, the .jpg has been the most widely used image format since the introduction of digital cameras. The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) developed the file type in the late 1980s to reduce large photographic datasets, making them easier to edit and transmit. This process gained immense popularity, particularly with the establishment of the Internet as a massive platform for data storage and transfer. Since the events of 9/11, which marked the first practically real-time online media event, the Internet has seen an increasingly uncontrollable saturation of images depicting global events, thereby fundamentally changing the dissemination and reception of image-based reporting like never before.
The circulation, and the consumption of digital press images in particular, are what Yul Tomatala reflects on in his artistic practice. Since starting as an iconographer in the news department of a french speaking Swiss media during his art studies at HEAD, the artist has developed a keen fascination for contemporary press images and their status within a complex media landscape and in a society characterized by multilayered power dynamics. Recurring elements in Yul Tomatala‘s installative, yet always image-focused work, therefore, consist of heavily enlarged excerpts from press photographs, which make the pixels and the underlying grid visible as constitutive elements of digital press photography while also highlighting them as a manipulable system.
In Hoarding (2024), Yul Tomatala takes on the structure of the billboard (or hoarding) – known, especially in the USA, as large-scale poster spaces in public areas – and largely empties the delicately reconstructed grid of its content. While the fragmented image subject, generated from a multitude of press photographs, becomes recognizable from a sufficient distance, it blurs into an excessive accumulation (another meaning of hoarding) of information within a constructed system upon closer approach. With reference to the concept of news fatigue, the artist observes how the exhausting flood of current (crisis) announcements increasingly induces a sense of indifference, distancing, or even alienation in people, leading to a state of mental absence. Far from a judgmental perspective, Yul Tomatala highlights in Hoarding that absence is not merely the absence of presence but rather constitutes a fundamental element of our daily perceptions.


Selma Meuli
(translated from German, P24)