Sarah Dobai, Photographs and Filmworks

My work with photography, video and film has pictured and characterized the qualities of alienation and artifice inherent to contemporary urban experience. Though many aspects of my practice are preconceived, using carefully chosen locations and actors as subjects, the work critically engages with recognisable situations and actual experiences of everyday life. Whilst my approach to photography, film and video has been wide-ranging, the work has seen the development of prevailing themes and methodologies predicated around the dynamics of space, place and the human subject as understood through our own intimate experience and through the images of collective experiences represented on TV, in the cinema and in literature. This exhibition, which contained 15 photographs and 2 film projections aimed to platform and contextualise my recent practice. The show explored two strands of my work; psychological portraiture and a socially engaged approach to picturing the city. The show premiered a specially commissioned two-screen video installation Model 280 which formed a bridge between the two groupings of work represented. This new work enacted a filmic car journey as a metaphor for the relationship between the individual/ the family and the social space around them, particularly reflecting on the role of the car in fashioning and representing ideas about the self. The trajectory of the exhibition as a whole aimed to address broad cultural debates about how the individual’s experience relates to an alienated industrial/post industrial society. This problematic has been a key concern of the theory and practice of photography, film and video in the field of fine art in recent years as witnessed in the works of Jeff Wall (Canada) or Gillian Wearing (UK)