2009 · Four C-prints, magazine, exhibition plan and overview of Lights in Orbit, Howard Wise Gallery, 1967

Displaced explores the relationship between light, photography and the experience of time. Following instructions published in a photography magazine from 1967, the work revisits historical experiments with light, bringing their photographic results into dialogue with the documents that prompted them.

The work begins with a photography magazine documenting Lights in Orbit, an exhibition held at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York in 1967. Alongside photographs of the exhibited installations, the article includes experimental interpretations of light and instructions inviting readers to make their own images. These instructions become the starting point for a new sequence of photographic experiments.

By carrying out a process described more than forty years earlier, Emmery brings the time of the original exhibition, its photographic documentation and his own image-making into a shared field. The magazine becomes both a historical document and a set of instructions capable of generating something in the present. His engagement with older photographic materials and techniques examines how the past can remain active through repetition, translation and reinterpretation.

Displaced also considers how artworks survive through their reproductions. An exhibition encountered through photographs takes on another form, shaped by the camera, the printed page and the imagination of a later viewer. Here, that encounter becomes the basis for further artistic production.

Presented together, the photographs, magazine and exhibition documents make the work’s development part of its visible form. The viewer moves between source and response, experiment and result, encountering time as a series of overlapping relationships.

Adapted from a catalogue text by Maria Kjær Themsen.