Cécile Hummel’s edition Distant Glance extends the artist’s longstanding interest in photographic technologies and archives, combining images from the photo archive of Kunsthalle Basel with other documentary materials. The elegant two-color print simultaneously pictures a 1962 swiss newspaper article and a sculptural head from Benin; the combination refers, on the one hand, to an exhibition of such artifacts held at Kunsthalle Basel in 1962 and, on the other hand, to a development in the handling of tribal art objects in general. Hummel digitally recorded damaged and fragile material (the photographic negative) and reprocessed it with a historical technology, the photolithography process (heliogravure), thus revealing the links in a chain of media tradition and media change.
*Sale of this edition benefits the Kunsthalle Basel photo archive’s continued research