Mishka Henner
No Man's Land
May 3 - June 3, 2012
"No Man's Land" explores the margins of urban and rural environments in Italy and Spain as experienced by what appear to be women soliciting sex, all captured by Google Street View cameras. Sourcing locations from online forums where men share local knowledge on the whereabouts of sex workers, artist Mishka Henner searches for these areas online and then re-frames each scene using Street View cameras. Blue Sky's presentation of "No Man's Land" features both photographic prints and a video installation Henner made from this exploration.
The Street View project heralds a new age of street-level cartography, offering a vast visual archive ready to be mined by photographers seeking to make sense of our physical and social environment. Significantly, it combines three key features of our age: the dominance of the car, the accessibility of the internet, and the ubiquity of camera technology. Roaming the world capturing millions of images indexed only according to location, the unauthored and mechanical function of Street View challenges a vocabulary and grammar of documentary photography often tied to notions of authorship, authenticity and technical craft.
In navigating between online communities and the visual records on offer, artist Mishka Henner describes himself as an aggregator of sorts, finding the visual means with which to represent a number of cultural and social issues revealed by the technology.
Artist Mishka Henner holds degrees from Loughborough University and University of London. Henner's work has been exhibited at venues in the US and Europe, and he was chosen as a signature artist in From Here On (2011), a group show representing the new age of photography at Les Rencontres d'Arles in France. At Arles, Henner also received the Kleine Hans award for six bookworks produced between 2010 and 2011. His work has been published in Photoworks, Ojo Depez, Photography Now, Else Magazine, and is in the Tate Collection of Artists' Books, London, the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Peel Special Collections, University of Alberta. Henner is a member of the ABC Artists' Books Cooperative and currently lives Manchester, England.