Mercury

Tallinn Photomonth exhibition Mercury at Tallinn Art Hall is a visual essay conceived by the artist Simon Dybbroe Møller with curator Post Brothers. The exhibition provides a lens for critically examining the ways in which we perceive the world through technological development.

“Photography as a material process had quite a short life. One could mark the endpoints of its historical moment as ranging from the toxic mercury fumes of the daguerreotype to the computer-generated quicksilver of the shape-shifting android assassin T-1000 in the film Terminator 2. Now the field of photography has itself become mercury-like. Liquid, protean, mutable, and fast flowing. Magically reflective, moving at the slightest touch.”

–  From the essay Mercury, Simon Dybbroe Møller

Mercury expands Dybbroe Møller’s consideration of the photographic into an embodied visual essay comprised of artworks by international artists alongside found material and arcane artefacts. The exhibition explores how photography has transformed itself from a physical object into a mere reference point. An abstract term that we apply to stuff, a part of the crystalline lens through which we perceive the world, a measuring stick that we carry around with us and relate everything to. It has become an ecology or, rather, the very terms through which our environment is apprehended and develops.