Artist and a-n member Jo Longhurst speaks to Ellen Wilkinson about the challenges of making art around unseen disabilities.

'Not all of us are governed by clock time. Not all of us can keep up or “keep time” with the rest of the orchestra.'—Alice Hattrick [1]

The box-like exhibition space is painted in a dark colour – almost black but with a hint of green. It reflects very little light.

This work features eight figures of various ethnicities and skin tones. Their ages range from 17-60. This moving image portrait runs for 5 minutes 29 seconds before looping seamlessly again, and again. There is no audio.

A few weeks ago a deadly virus spread across the world, forcing governments to come up with drastic measures to counter the contagion. At this time, the most effective course of action has had to do with physical distancing between people, but also the warning to not touch any surfaces which other people might have been in contact with.

Competitive gymnastics is interwoven with contradiction. It is a sport synonymous with near-superhuman levels of strength, flexibility, and co-ordination, yet its finely-honed bodies frequently operate under the shadow of multiple injuries.

The field of photography has recently been described as one that exacerbates antagonisms, “a permanent hotbed of contradictions.” This is also an apt description for the work of the artists who have participated in the Aimia | AGO Photography Prize these last ten years.

Jo, you live and work in London, but recently travelled to Brazil to work with elite gymnasts. What attracted you to Brazilian gymnasts and what has emerged from your trip?

The production of images (or almost) is unquestionably the language of Jo Longhurst. Beyond the theme, the artist searches for a series of registrations of gymnasts’ bodies, the possibility of understanding the body as a specific object to be tensioned in space.

The work of the British artist Jo Longhurst makes visible new perspectives on the quest for perfection. Working through active collaboration with her subjects, she depicts the passion and determinaton, as well as the challenges and difficulties facing those who cultivate it.

When Muybridge made his series of photographs examining whether a galloping horse could be airborne, he opened up a whole new approach to the use of photography as a medium to capture physical movement. In her exhibition Other Spaces this capturing of movement has clearly inspired Jo Longhurst.

Like a lot of little girls, I loved watching women’s gymnastics on television—those figures who looked so familiar until they sprang into action like superheroes, transforming seamlessly into objects of sleek beauty, propelled into the air by the force of their own bodies.

Jo, I've been looking forward to having this conversation with you. With your forthcoming exhibition and the publication of this book, I suspect that I am catching you at an especially reflective moment.

Jo Longhurst's Other Spaces at Mostyn coincided with the televisual intensity of the London Olympic Games. It would make sense that her photographs of gymnasts, shot several years earlier at the World Artistic Gymnastic Championships and during her time spent as visiting artist at Heathrow Gymnastic Club, were exhibited to capture something of the Olympic fever. Yet,

Part way through the making of Other Spaces I was invited to join Brazilian artist Frederico Camara in conversation, to discuss his ‘atlas’ project In an Ideal World. We based our discussion around Michel Foucault’s 1967 text Des Espaces Autres, which considers ideas of physical and psychological space in relation to location and time.

In her multi-part work “The Refusal,” British photographer Jo Longhurst has produced a photographic monument to her own whippets as well as the entire race of whippets. In her large-format whippet portraits she examines the idea of perfection with reference to racial standards as well as the identity construction of breeders, carried out via dogs. In “Sighthound,” however, she has created an installation which requires a certain type of becoming animal from viewers.

One thing that I enjoy is when I find connections between the works of different artists. Many of you have had the same experience where you are looking through a book and one image or a set of images triggers you to run to the book shelf to find its compliment in another artist. This recently happened to me while looking through Jo Longhurst’s book The Refusal from Steidl. Immediately it brought to mind a book by Roni Horn called Bird so I thought it was a sign that these two stand-alone books be reviewed together.

While David Chipperfield’s extension of the Museum Folkwang on the premises of the former Ruhrland Museum is slowly but steadily taking shape, and works from the collection at Villa Hügel are being selected for display, Sabine Maria Schmidt, curator for contemporary art, and Ute Eskildsen, curator for photography, have relocated their exhibition programme to Horst Loy’s construction from the 1960s – a museum building, which in terms of light, space and proportion remains one of Germany’s finest.

A man is watching a badly filmed video. The picture quality is poor. The camera operator zooms the long lens into focus, then shakily pulls back again to reveal the plastic dashboard of a white van. It is early morning.

For a number of years now Jo Longhurst has been photographing Whippets. Drawn in by the eugenic obsession of the breeders seeking to create the perfect dog, there is a sinister edge to how these dogs have been ‘made’ which taps into contemporary concerns about genetic modification and cloning.

For an artist who jokingly claims to suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder, the retrospective of William Wegman’s artistic output, currently on show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, demonstrates a remarkably sustained and consistent exploration of ideas over a period of almost four decades.

As the last words of Dutch Schulz infamously testify, pets have a prominent place in our subconscious (‘Oh, Oh dog Biscuit, and when he is happy he doesn’t get snappy…’)

Critical thinking around the animal has in many ways failed to move on from the ideas of René Descartes, who viewed the animal as a biological machine with no thoughts or feelings. Philosophical writing on animals almost exclusively refers to a wild, or nondomestic animal. The pet is missing.