Ben Caro and Kat Cutler-MacKenzie

Staging a Gaze

Staging a Gaze is a dual-channel 35mm slide projection that seeks to explore how techniques including close-up photography, performative interaction, and juxtaposition can be used to resist and subvert the ‘straight image’ implied within the setting of the camera and the museological display of the body.

It was made in collaboration with two sculptures at the National Museum of Scotland named Asklepios and Dionysus. In Staging a Gaze, the space between artefacts and publics in a museum is understood as a “contact zone…a space in which peoples [and their associated object cultures] geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations…involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (Mary Louise Pratt).

In Staging a Gaze the artists explore how the lens, from camera to smartphone to Google to eye, can be a conduit for “contact zones”, as it can introduce new perspectives and make visible the politics of the gaze.

In the museum setting, Caro and Cutler-MacKenzie’s photographs also offer a sensual or tactile form of “contact” between viewer and artefact, drawing upon techniques from “haptic visuality”, in which “the eyes themselves function like organs of touch” (Laura Marks).

About Ben and Kat

Ben Caro (b. London, 1998) and Kat Cutler-MacKenzie (b. Belfast, 1997) live and work in Edinburgh, where they hold a studio at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. The duo share a collaborative artistic practice that draws upon haptic, tactile forms of photography, and pedagogic methods of communication, such as the 35mm slide lecture.

As they are both trained art historians — with a combined background in archaeology, cinema, historical re-enactment, and feminist theory — their work can be understood as a form of practice-based research.

In 2021 they undertook the Graduate Residency at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop and in 2022 the Copper Leg Art Residency in Estonia. Caro and Cutler-MacKenzie have exhibited at venues including gr_und gallery (Berlin, 2023), Talbot Rice Gallery (Edinburgh, 2018 and 2019), R.E.M Space (Istanbul, 2018), Vent Space (Tallinn, 2018) and Crate (Margate, 2016).

They are currently working towards the exhibition of new work at French Street in Glasgow as part of the exhibition Touch Points.