Nuno Santos - Surface / Metallic / Parts
An exhibition of work by dance photographer Nuno Santos, encompassing three series of personal projects – Surface, Metallic Bodies and Parts.
Surface
Surface explores the need for a physical point of gravity reference – the floor – for the viewer to be able to understand movement. A parallel can be established with non-physical elements, such as emotions or thoughts, where these only have meaning when related to a point of reference. To challenge this relationship to a physical point of gravity, a water surface is used as the ‘floor’ – allowing for a ‘moving’ point of reference, exploring what happens to that need.
Metallic Bodies
Investigates the aimed precision of movement in dance and the repetitive process dancers undertake in order to achieve this precision. In many ways this repetition and precision echoes the function of machinery, purpose-built for a task. The dancer’s body is honed and shaped for precision and repetition through discipline and focused training. Similar at times in demand to that of machinery, the body of the dancer moves through the edges of precision into free-flow movement.
Parts
The focus of this series is to create images that challenge continuity of the human body. Continuous lines define the movement associated with the human body and Parts looks at how breaking those lines gives different body parts autonomous existences. Visually a symbiotic relationship between the parts is created, giving the viewer a notion of body, and therefore, continuity.
Based in London, Santos has worked for and collaborated with some of the best contemporary dance artists, choreographers and companies in the UK (Protein Dance, Maresa von Stockert, Stan Won’t Dance, Shobana Jeyasingh and Henri Oguike). He has been commissioned by the London Contemporary Dance School to document their work over several years. Santos’ original work and conceptual photography is highly collaborative, working closely with dance artists, stylists and designers to explore notions of movement, displacement, time and space as communication structures.
