Caroline Rosello Longuet

For the Time Being is a programme of photo performances using the social media platform Snapchat as a way of expanding the gallery experience and continuing The Photographers' Gallery ongoing exploration of photography and image culture in the digital age. The project is curated by postgraduate students from the Curating Contemporary Art Programme, Royal College of Art, in collaboration with The Photographers’ Gallery.

Over five days, Agil Abdullayev, Feng Mengbo, Max Grau and Tamara Kametani and artist collective Agorama will be making new work, which questions ideas of nostalgia, collective memory and intimacy through the lens of social media apps. Through a combination of dispersed online posts, photo streaming, performance and participatory workshops, For the Time Being interrogates the shifting position of the photographic medium in relation to the phenomenon of online image sharing culture.

Max Grau presents a live element on Thursday 9 May by staging a lecture-performance at TPG, examining the possibility of utopia as propagated by Snapchat. Over the course of the programme, Tamara Kametani will offer daily posts using news headlines interspersed with personal and archival images that interrogate the moment that public information becomes personal memory. Providing a different perspective on the role of media, cultural memory and queer identities, Agil Abdullayev presents a pseudo-fictional character born of various popular social media aesthetics. Feng Mengbo will record and share his own collection, as a way to map a personal narrative onto a larger socio-cultural transformation witnessed in China. Finally, Agorama will create an interactive moving image work, installed in the Gallery’s studio floor over the closing weekend as a way of contemplating the intimate possibilities of digital connection.

For the Time Being further explores the possibility of a platform like Snapchat to reshape the way we understand and navigate traditional spaces for presentation and curating.