Josephine Pryde: Miss Austen Still Enjoys Photography. juxtaposes three distinct sets of photographic works and one sculptural object.

Scale (2012) is a series of 36 photographs of guinea pigs, a creature we know as a household pet, a rodent and a lab specimen. Josephine Pryde singularizes each of these guinea pigs –an animal with no facial expression to speak of– by using props, shifting depth of focus and practising slight variations in photographic feel.

A second set in the two side rooms on the ground floor includes portraits of young women selected from three larger series: Hiroe Takizawa, Sales and Sales Support Specialist (2008), Conception (2011) and Attitudes of Motherhood (2007 – 2008). With titles such as A Lifetime of Self-Sacrifice Can Be Blown in One Unguarded Moment or Mild Jealousy, pictures taken from Attitude of Motherhood take on a narrative dimension that often seems at odds with the models’ obviously staged gestures and expressions; while in the Conception series, women lost in their own thoughts, some holding a pregnancy test, supposedly just learned they might be pregnant.

Besides reactivating methods and ideas borrowed from such diverse fields as advertisement, fashion and portrait photography, the works exhibited in the lower levels of the Kunsthalle make use of time-lapse techniques that document sights not perceivable by the human eye– such as creative processes: Inspiration Emerges (2012) shows the bubbling of non-Newtonian fluid, whose singular viscosity gives it the appearance of being somehow organic and growing just as Kiss of the Muse (2003) documents the slow degradation of a jelly-like green goo.

Miss Austen Still Enjoys Photography. follows Miss Austen Enjoys Photography., an exhibition that took place earlier this year at the Kunstverein für Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf. The exhibition is made possible by the generous support of Kultur Stadt Bern, George Foundation and Burgergemeinde Bern.