The Late Estate Broomberg & Chanarin
Ghetto Series, Self-portrait by Mario, Rene Vallejo Psychiatric Hospital, Cuba, 2003
C-print mounted on hardboard
45.4 x 69.5 cm
The photo of these numbered and named pill pots has been taken at a psychiatric hospital in Cuba, where the artists asked each inhabitant the same set of questions: ‘How did you get here? Who is in power? Where do you go to be alone? To make love? To get your teeth fixed?’ (artist statement)
Despite the inhabitants not being visible, it is an image with cultural and emotional clout. This is exactly what Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s almost forensic investigation of the relationship between photography, power and catastrophe was about during their twenty-three-year partnership.
Theirs is one of many collaborative practices represented in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection. Just as the Roberts Institute of Art is increasingly working in together with partners, this duo announced their ‘death’ with an obituary notice for their joint artistic practice and a ‘posthumous retrospective’ in Barcelona which ran until 23 May and questioned why authorship, memory and heritage are too often seen as closed concepts.