Political Chaos, 2008

In his work, Paul Kooiker (1964, the Netherlands) investigates the act of ‘looking’. His photographs conjure questions about the part played by the gaze and the subject, the motivations of both photographer and viewer, and the photographer as a viewer. In 'Political Chaos' (2008), Kooiker highlights that muddled zone where the false intimacy of propaganda—only meaningfully different from modern reality TV and tabloids in its application—and the equally false abstraction granted by distance interact. We see figures swimming in the sea at Xiamen, a dot spied from a distance; we know of Mao Zedong who made a point of having himself photographed while swimming as to prove his vitality and modest beginnings, and somewhere in-between, uncertainty grows.