L'ombre de ton ombre

L’ombre de ton ombre is the first monograph dedicated to Australian-born and Berlin-based artist Paul Knight, co-published by Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA, Melbourne, UNSW Galleries, Sydney, and Perimeter Editions. The publication accompanies his first survey exhibition, co-commissioned by MUMA and UNSW Galleries.

For more than two decades, Knight has taken intimacy as his subject, considering its relationship to representation and the social designs that underpin its expression. This has led him, via an interest in science, to the potential role that intimacy plays in consciousness as an evolutionary line. Knight’s ongoing photographic project, Chamber Music, records the life he shares with his partner Peter. Since their meeting in 2009, the series has accumulated hundreds of glimpses into the domestic space of their relationship, with its images created through varying degrees of pre-meditation and chance; often the camera timer is set so that it simply captures what it sees. The photographs test the ability of this machine – the camera – and the prints it produces to capture and contain intimacy. The images hold human love, which Knight proposes might be our only positive legacy in a future in which machine intelligence carries on, bearing the mark of its creators, beyond humanity itself.