Coined by cubist artists Braque and Picasso, the term “collage” comes from the French word coller, or “to glue”. The movement itself emerged under this pair of artists, who began working with various mediums to create avant-garde assemblages around 1910. The art of Collage is collecting, collating and corresponding a set of images/visuals to make an entirely new composition. Collage, from its very beginning, has been a means to transcend the ordinary and explore ever new possibilities beyond the limitations of any given medium.

Collage broke the ancient ideal of stylistic unity, and with it the disjunctive mood officially entered the syntax of art: the urge to slash and burn, to rip and tear, to cut and paste pieces into something joltingly different and new. Reacting to the impact of the computer and the Internet, photography is in the midst of a historic shift in which the photographic image is no longer synonymous with camerawork. Add to that the computer’s intrinsic aptitude for Collage, for mixing it up digitally, and you have what almost amounts to a coup. Collage seemingly sits with photography in the art world, as Collage was one of the initial processes of what we now call “retouching” or experimental/post-photography. These dazzling possibilities of post-production have transformed photography from a primarily perceptual to a more deeply creative medium. The Collage aesthetic is not about point and shoot, it is not about the camera, nor about the photographer. It recognizes the multiplicity of form and content, duality, contradiction, juxtaposition, complexity and expansion as the essential qualities of modern life and modern art, and thus epitomizes what Beyond Photography means with the term ‘Image Creation’.

ASSEMBLY showcases the different forms of Collage and how they are made, as well as look into the associative aspects of art creation by ways of open ended interpretation. Collage offers different layers of reading and prolongs photography to reveal unconscious fantasies. The works exhibited showcase and elaborate on the essence of Collage: the regrouping of images and the reverting of the mundane via our psyche. The show is designed to showcase the wandering mind of artists and viewers alike through the medium of Collage with some very exciting artists from all over the globe.