David Bate. Modern Times

David Bate’s practice has increasingly engaged a fascination with space and subjectivity, and developed a conceptual practice that consistently displays an oppositional gaze, refusing easy solutions and subject positions. Bate’s practice embraces multiplicity, desire, difference and fantasy to explore contemporary life.

The project Machinic Unconscious addresses the effects of a Covid 19 ‘lockdown’ experience, living with a broken digital screen, as emblematic of the fractured social relations and desire for connection. SOT, an acronym for Singapore-on-Thames, presents a newly redeveloped area of south London, juxtaposing the ideal of Singapore as the ‘background’ ideal model for a new London, a fantasy redevelopment. In both of these photoworks. Modern Times manifests as a disruption of social time and space, where what we consider our natural space is disrupted by photo-experience.

David Bate is widely known for his extensive international publications of critical writings on the history and theory of photography and experimental visual artworks. His work focuses on the critical interactions between the visual image, subjectivity and society. Educated at the Polytechnic of Central London on the famous BA (Hons) Film and Photographic Arts course, he later took the MA Social History of Art at Leeds University, where he also completed a PhD in the Fine Art Department. He has lectured and presented work all over the world. In 2018 he was recipient of the Royal Photographic Society Award for Education. Currently Professor of Photography at the University of Westminster, London, UK, he is also a co-founder of the London collective art gallery Accident and Five Years, and co-editor of the photography journal Photographies.  

See also: https://www.davidbate.net/

Supporters: Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Pallas University of Applied Sciences