English author Samuel Johnson once wrote, “The true characters of men may be found in their letters.” “Correspondence,” an exhibition featuring Auguste Orts—a Belgian collective specializing in the moving image—comprises an assemblage of books, videos, and written exchanges between the four members of the group: Herman Asselberghs, Sven Augustijnen, Manon de Boer, and Anouk De Clercq. Discussing one another’s work, they disclose influences, aspirations, and dicta. A figurative fifth character emerges from the dialogue: an obsessive, enthusiastic archivist, full of wide-eyed wonder mixed with a wry awareness of historical antecedents and a restless dissatisfaction with the current state of cinema.

Each artist has a desk displaying his or her letters with accompanying props (copies of Baudelaire and Foucault, as well as screens playing Godard, Eustache, and footage of Nina Simone). Viewing stations give access to any of the group’s films and videos, while Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving, 1959, repeats hourly. While none of the group produces work in collaboration, this show embodies the artists’ common concerns: separating film into its constituent elements to critically examine the space where sound and image meet. It is a heady mix: Their work shares a durational intensity, actively demanding the viewer take part in their dark, nonnarrative explorations, which present a nearly gothic formalism. As in much of their previous moving-image work, a common acoustic experience links disparate visual elements, as artist Scanner remixes the sound tracks of their films into one audio piece that plays in the gallery.

Of course, Johnson went on to say, “There is, indeed, no transaction which offers stronger temptations to fallacy and sophistication than epistolary intercourse.” There is a degree of self-consciousness in Auguste Orts’s letters, but the name-dropping and occasional manifesto-like tone seems more a concerted effort to reveal the group’s working processes. The lounge setup, through which visitors can freely wander, allows for an open-ended and in-depth portrait, where, as De Clercq says in one letter, “cinema—as opposed to writing, which is all about stating and recording—is an ongoing project, in which one moment replaces another.”

— Chris Fite-Wassilak

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin have turned photojournalism, a fraught genre of photography, on its head in their exhibition “The Day Nobody Died.” Earlier this year, the duo unrolled a 164-foot-long roll of photographic paper during both critical and mundane moments on the front line with British Army units in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province, exposing 23-foot-long sections to the sun for twenty seconds at a time. Wartime events, such as a press conference and suicide, are represented as abstract strips of stark color divested of any figurative detail. These works, removed from the context of photojournalism, are aesthetically impressive. It’s easy to enjoy these glaring delineations of light and heat; the black, white, red, and blue hues make an impact on the retina. But placing the works back in the context of the Afghan conflict is an altogether different and unsettling scenario. Broomberg and Chanarin’s naked prints deny viewers the opportunity to pass moral or aesthetic judgement on war scenes. Only the titles underline the basic scenarios (for example, The Fixer’s Execution and The Repatriation, both 2008); the rest is up to the viewer. Empathy or revulsion: The choice is yours.

The effect is strangely more cathartic than any stock moments of suffering and horror. A series of almost comical stills, which depict the cardboard box containing the photographic paper in transit on buses and jeeps, is a quirky foil to the main images. In an adjoining gallery, recent works depicting a deer’s head, an animal skeleton photographed in Darfur, and a gun-toting woman all seem hyperrealistic after the opaque imagery from Afghanistan. The intelligent selection of work provides an intriguing mix of forms and tones.

— Gareth Harris