Aesthetica
THE ART & CULTURE MAGAZINE
www.aestheticamagazine.com
Issue 104 December / January 2022
CREATING AN ARCHIVE
EXPLORING DEEP TIME
ETHICS OF CONSUMPTION
Hyperreal images draw attention to threatened natural landscapes
Documenting complex political tensions in the American South
Geological data comes to life in a show that spans Earth’s history
Photographs that focus on food and the wider effects of mass production
UK £6.95 Europe €12.95 USA $16.49
ACTS OF PRESERVATION
Aesthetica 1
2 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 3
4 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 5
6 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 7
8 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 9
10 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 11
12 Aesthetica
Welcome Editor’s Note
On the Cover Harriet Moutsopoulos (aka Lexicon Love) produces digital collages that renegotiate and manipulate the origins of images, provoking, teasing and confusing the viewer. Comedic, yet distinctly satirical, these pieces challenge traditional notions of beauty. (p. 112)
Cover Image: Harriet Moutsopoulos, Haughty Holly (2020). From the series Corned Beef. Courtesy of the artist.
There is so much happening right now. It feels like everything is moving at a cataclysmic speed. For 20 months, Covid has dominated our lives. The impact of this will be felt for many years to come, because we can only start to make sense of what's happened with time and distance. We heard governments say that we will build back better, but I am doubtful that we will see real change. I am terrified by the climate crisis and the long-term impact it will have on the planet and humankind. I keep trying to figure out a way that we can galvanise in order to reach people on a local level. How can we get more people to care? Moreover, how can we get more people to change? Some of these changes can be so simple, like cutting down on meat, walking instead of driving short distances, turning your thermostat down. If millions of people did this, say, starting tomorrow, the impact would be huge. Creating a community that takes shared responsibility is one of our biggest challenges. How can we set this idea in motion? This issue is dedicated to perseverance, resilience and determination. In the face of anything, we do have the power to change. David Benjamin Sherry’s large-format images of the American west examine endangered monuments in aftermath of the Trump administration. Meanwhile, Foto/Industria's photography biennale offers a look at industrialised farming, and its impact upon global consumption processes. Then we explore deep geological time in the works of Noémie Goudal, who foregrounds the larger narrative of Earth’s 4.543-billion-year lifespan, combining elements of palaeoclimatology and art. In photography, we are thrilled to present further series from Ingrid Weyland, Kevin Krautgartner, Kate Theo, Karen Constine and Harriet Moutsopoulos on the cover. The last words go to Jennifer Blessing and Nat Trotman, Curators of Photography, and Performance and Media respectively, who speak in detail about identity as part of Wearing Masks, the new Gillian Wearing show at Guggenheim, New York. Cherie Federico
Aesthetica 13
100
76
30
48
64
94
36
82
14 Aesthetica
112
54
contents
Art 16 News California Museum of Photography launches a "viral model" exhibition, whilst New Art Exchange, Nottingham, explores love, labour and liberty.
26 10 to See These exhibitions move from the emergence of cloud-based data sharing to the divisive effects of voting politics within wider family dynamics.
30 Creating an Archive The American South has diverse and complex histories. What happens when 16 photographers are invited to picture the region over 25 years?
36 Ecological Disturbance Ingrid Weyland's collage compositions tap into the age of Anthropocentrism, with human hands literally altering ecosystems from the inside out.
48 Exploring Deep Time Palaeoclimatology includes the study of ancient climates. Noémie Goudal foregrounds the larger narrative of Earth’s 4.543-billion-year lifespan.
54 Lines of Production Kevin Krautgartner’s In Full Bloom series captures large-scale tulip agriculture from above. Aerial shots depict rows of flowers like striped barcodes.
64 Journey into Colour Graphic artist Kate Theo places characters in their own surreal worlds. Concentric circles hover like ellipses alongside balloons and golden cages.
76 Ethics of Consumption The Foto/Industria biennale offers a provocative glimpse at what we eat, how it’s presented and its larger cultural impact, from the field to the table.
82 From the Orchard William Mullan and Andrea A. Trabucco-Campos offer highly stylised portraits of apples: the fruit that has long symbolised knowledge and power.
94 Acts of Preservation David Benjamin Sherry’s large-format images, shot in hyperreal monochrome, depict sites that were threatened during Trump’s administration.
100 Worlds Transformed Karen Constine subverts the LA landscape using an infrared camera. Deserted suburban streets are transfigured into surreal, hallucinogenic planes.
112 Satirical Photomontage Harriet Moutsopoulos (aka Lexicon Love) creates digital collages that manipulate the origins of images, unsettling the viewer in the process.
124 Exhibitions BALTIC offers intimate perspectives of the lesbian community in 1990s San Francisco. The National Portrait Gallery hosts the Taylor Wessing Prize.
129 Film We review Paolo Sorrentino's The Hand of God, a sublime auto-fiction, alongside an affecting new feature drama directed by Maria Sødahl.
131 Music Covers is Chan Marshall's (aka Cat Power's) third album, and it feels like the dawn of a new era. Noga Erez and Love Object also feature.
Books
Artists’ Directory
Last Words
133 The Latest Publications Titles include Digital Suffragists: Women, the Web and the Future of Democracy, as well as a book from photographer, writer and historian Teju Cole.
141 Featured Practitioners This edition surveys artists working with, and for, nature, using both traditional and contemporary methods to depict a world that's rapidly changing.
146 Guggenheim Museum Jennifer Blessing and Nat Trotman, curators of photography, performance and media, expand upon the themes of a new Gillian Wearing show.
Aesthetica Magazine is trade marked worldwide. © Aesthetica Magazine Ltd 2021.
The Aesthetica Team: Editor: Cherie Federico Associate Editor: Kate Simpson Digital Content Creator: Eleanor Sutherland Digital Assistant: Saffron Ward
Advertisement Enquiries: Megan Hobson (0044) (0)844 568 2001 advertising@aestheticamagazine.com
Reviews
ISSN 1743-2715. All work is copyrighted to the author or artist. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be used or reproduced without permission from the publisher. Published by Cherie Federico and Dale Donley. Aesthetica Magazine 21 New Street York, YO1 8RA, UK Newstrade Distribution: Warners Group Publications plc. Gallery & Specialist Distribution: Central Books. Printed by Warners Midlands plc.
Advertising Coordinator: Megan Hobson Artists’ Directory Coordinator: Katherine Smira Production Director: Dale Donley Office Manager: Helen Osbond Designer: Matt Glasby Contributors: Diane Smyth Olivia Hampton Reviewers: Jack Solloway, Robyn Sian Cusworth Olivia Hampton, Katie Tobin, Shyama Laxman, James Mottram, Beth Webb, Stephanie Watts, Matt Swain, Kyle Bryony, Marthe Lisson, Eleanor Sutherland, Greg Thomas, Christopher Kanal, Monica de Vidi
Artists’ Directory Enquiries: Katherine Smira directory@aestheticamagazine.com Subscriptions: subscriptions@aestheticamagazine.com General Enquiries: info@aestheticamagazine.com Press Releases: pr@aestheticamagazine.com
Follow us: aestheticamagazine.com facebook.com/aestheticamagazine twitter.com/AestheticaMag pinterest.com/AestheticaMag instagram.com/AestheticaMag
Aesthetica 15
Zohra Opoku, Ficus Carica, 2015 Screen-print on textile, Image Courtesy of the artist.
news
16 Aesthetica
Sense of Humanity LACED New Art Exchange, Nottingham | Until 8 January nae.org.uk
Laced: In Search of What Connects Us is an immersive show comprising painting, photography, video, sound, textiles and drawing. It welcomes audiences into a bold landscape of vivid colours, deep-ocean waters and lush tropical vegetation – spaces that are contemplative and empowering. Seven women artists, presented here as part of a cultural network, are linked to curator Loren Hansi Gordon through shared connections to Africa and its Diasporas. This "temporary stitchwork" brings together Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Rahima Gambo, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Zohra Opoku, Tabita Rezaire, Lerato Shadi and Michaela Yearwood-Dan. Several of the artists employ textiles to tell their stories, threading their practice directly to the city of Nottingham, which, for over 100 years, was known as the lacemaking capital of the world. Lerato Shadi (b. 1979), for example, offers a series of wall-hung pieces made in 2020 – red crocheted squares and rectangles sewn onto raw linen canvases and mounted on stretcher bars. Wura-Natasha Ogunji (b. 1970) presents a selection of hand-stitched drawings on architectural paper. Ogunji’s practice, as a whole, interrogates the thresholds between public and private spaces and the experiences of women throughout these spheres, particularly in the everyday action of walking. Timely and relevant, this show also contemplates the repeated threats to women’s safety. Gordon invites us to consider whether we are truly free if we still feel fear, whilst also drawing attention to our wider sense of humanity – the interconnected experience we share as a species regardless of gender, nationality or age.
Aesthetica 17
news
Points of Departure CONSTELLATIONS SFMOMA, San Francisco | Until 21 August
sfmoma.org
The ethics of representation have never been more important, or more closely scrutinised. Whose stories can we tell, how and why? Are we aware of the history that comes with the material? How can museums – and by extension, all public platforms, whether cultural, political or social – offer diverse and authentic projects? Galleries all over the world are now making widespread structural changes and institutional pledges, owing to the “asymmetries of power” that have governed over the years. Constellations: Photographs in Dialogue explores how additions to a collection “expand, deepen and complicate the stories a museum can tell.” Across six galleries, the exhibition creates moments of “dialogue, resonance and tension”, with four curators choosing brand new acquisitions as a point of departure. Featured names include Poklong Anading, Daisuke Yokota, Zanele Muholi and Imogen Cunningham, amongst others. Wendy Red Star's stand-out pieces challenge mainstream representations of Native American peoples, having photographed Crow culture on her own terms for many years. The Four Seasons series uses visual bathos to undermine the romantic idealisations of Native Americans being “one with nature.” Cardboard cut-out animals and Astroturf reference commercially produced prints from the 1970s. In a 2016 interview with Aperture, Star notes: “The USA was founded on the eradication of Native people. We were also, paradoxically, used for tourism to promote the expansion of the west. For some reason, Native people are represented as eradicated. We are these mythical creatures.”
18 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 19
Wendy Red Star, Spring, from the series Four Seasons, 2006, printed 2017; collection SFMOMA, gift of Loren G. Lipson, M.D.; Ⓒ Wendy Red Star
Ansel Adams, American (1902–1984), Aspens, Northern New Mexico, 1958, printed later. Gelatin silver print. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Malcolm S. Millard in memory of his father, Everett L. Millard, Class of 1898, P1983.17.6. © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.w
news
20 Aesthetica
Images and Activism DEVOUR THE LAND Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge | Until 16 January harvardartmuseums.org
Photography plays a significant role in highlighting environmental damage, which can be difficult to see, much less identify and measure. Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970 shines a light on the unexpected and often hidden consequences of militarism on general wellbeing in the United States. The show explores the impacts of armed activity on the American landscape – and the ways in which photography supports activism in response to these effects. It begins in a dynamic period for both environmental activism and photography, continuing through five decades. It provides visitors with a space to consider the precariousness of our collective future, whilst suggesting how preparations for war and its aftermath can, at times, lead to instances of ecological regeneration. Some 60 artists bring together a variety of approaches, each considering the role of the human hand, or lack thereof, in the landscape. Sim Chi Yin’s Mountain range surrounding the Nevada Test Site (2017) casts the landscape in a brilliant hyperreal blue. As the artist notes: “My intention was to get the viewer to suspend their sense of place and perhaps moral judgement: who gets to call whom a 'rouge state' or decide how many nuclear warheads is too many?” By contrast, Ansel Adams’ Aspens, Northern New Mexico (1958), suggests the pleasant indifference of a shady grove to its human visitors, cast in dramatic monochrome. A curated Spotify playlist is available, extending the experience of the exhibition, featuring key songs by artists such as Johnny Cash, Mos Def, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings and Midnight Oil.
Aesthetica 21
news
Creativity under Constraint ART IN THE PLAGUE YEAR Ongoing | Online
artintheplagueyear.com
Emerging from lockdown, many of us might find that our memories are hazy, the events of the last 20 months blending together as we moved from one room to the next, and back again. For many of us, 2020 is a year that's hard to remember at all. Beyond human reception to trauma, there's a tangible reason for this blurring as our brains stop taking notes of our surroundings. As British economist Tim Harford notes: “Our brains seem to record a new place with a particular vividness. Even when a moment has nothing to do with place and everything to do with intellectual or emotional novelty, place still registers. A month of repeating the same routine might seem endless, but will be barely a blip in the memory: the ‘diffs’ are not significant enough for the brain to bother with.” (Financial Times, August 2020). Despite this sense of stagnation, creativity thrives in constraints. California Museum of Photography celebrates this notion with an online exhibition, Art in the Plague Year. In this expansive show, subtitled There is Another World, But it is in this One, 55 photographers explore how the future leaks into the present – how we can use art to find new pathways beyond the physical. Douglas McCulloh, Senior Curator, notes: “What will emerge from a year of tumultuous events? How do we cross into a new future? 2020 was a year of beauty, pain and strangeness. Coronavirus laid bare societal inequities, racial rifts and economic injustices. Artists, meanwhile, did what they always do: respond, create, guide us into the future.” Art in the Plague Year is a testament to photography as a record, and also as an act of recovery.
22 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 23
Bootsy Holler, Deadman Cove - 0811.1949 (2020), courtesy of the artist and Virginia Visual Arts, London www.virginiavisualarts.com
Thomas Demand, Repository, 2018. C-Print/Diasec. Courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles; Esther Schipper Galerie, Berlin; Galerie Sprüth Magers, London, Berlin, and Los Angeles; Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo. © Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/UPRAVIS, Moscow.
news
24 Aesthetica
Playing with Perception MIRROR WITHOUT MEMORY Garage Museum, Moscow | Until 30 January garagemca.org/en
The work of Thomas Demand (b. 1964) may, at first glance, appear to show empty, mundane interiors. Don’t be fooled. These are, in fact, highly politically charged locations that have been painstakingly re-staged in paper and cardboard using found photographs as a guide. Room (Zimmer) (1996), for example, is inspired by photographs of the hotel room in which Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard developed his theory of Dianetics, whilst Kitchen (2004) is based on shots taken by soldiers of the compound in Tikrit where Sadam Hussein was captured. Over the years, Demand has crafted a unique compositional process that is both Constructivist and Deconstructionist – exploring the life cycles of models and their synchronisation or juxtaposition with reality. Once the artist photographs these impressively realistic-looking sets with a large format camera, he destroys them, leaving only the still image in its place. French philosopher Jacques Rancière describes these compositions as “mirrors” – leading to the title of Demand’s first show in Russia. Mirror Without Memory comprises several fragments spread across two floors, bringing together pieces from 1991 to 2021. Curator Katya Inozemtseva expands: “The various combinations of the exhibition become part of a lengthy process of seeking, selecting, constructing / cutting and photographing objects, imparting a specific sense of temporariness that merges with other ‘temporarinesses’: our unreliable memory, the washing out of pictures from the first pages of search engines and their immersion into an endless digital archive of images ‘on demand.’”
Aesthetica 25
art
10 to See RECOMMENDED EXHIBITIONS THIS SEASON
This season's shows – spanning the UK, USA and Europe – consider a state of flux. These 10 exhibitions move from the emergence of cloud-based data sharing to the divisive effects of the Trump administration on family dynamics, across photography, installation and more.
1
Amazônia Science Museum, London | Until 1 March
sciencemuseum.org.uk Sebastião Salgado has been photographing the Amazon for the last seven years, working with 12 different indigenous communities to demonstrate the overwhelming damage of over-consumption on both the Brazilian landscape and its peoples. On show at the Science Museum, London, are 200 black and white images presented alongside video interviews with leaders and activists, and an immersive soundtrack. Viewers are invited to experience the beauty and diversity of the region, whilst understanding the critical ways its biodiversity is under threat.
2
Songs of the Sky
C/O Berlin | 11 December - 21 April
co-berlin.org “Since the turn of the millennium, major technology providers such as Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft have been offering cloud computing services: decentralised networks that organise and continually relocalise our data in the digital ether. In art, this has led to the return of the cloud, a motif that historically has always appeared when things were not yet clearly in sight. Clouds are seismographs for change.” C/O Berlin brings together 16 artists who each consider these natural phenomena – their form and formlessness, visibility and invisibility.
3
Greater New York 2021
4
Known and Strange
MoMA PS1, New York | Until 18 April
1
moma.org New York currently has a population of around eight and a half million, with one gallery per 5,600 people. The city breeds creativity, and has housed some of the world’s most revered artists, from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Diane Arbus. MoMA PS1 celebrates this continued history with a survey of practitioners living in the city. The fifth edition of Greater New York honours not only the persistence of artists who have worked largely unrecognised over the years, but their ability to help us make sense of the ruptures that have shaped New York.
V&A, London | Until 6 November
vam.ac.uk In 2021, the lines between fact and fiction have never been more blurred. Truth has slipped from being objective to subjective across politics and culture. V&A explores this notion through the lens, inviting audiences to see pieces from the likes of Paul Graham, Susan Meiselas, Zanele Muholi and Mitch Epstein. This show calls into question stylistic experimentation and intellectual enquiry, from pieces that expose the discrimination faced by the South African Black LBGTQIA+ community, to compositions that place the viewer in the unknown.
5
Prison Nation Davis Museum, Greater Boston | Until 16 June
wellesley.edu In the USA, an estimated two million people are incarcerated, with a further four million on probation, and 870,000 prisoners on parole. This exhibition, organised by Aperture Foundation, considers the ways prisoners are represented through imagery, given that those in detainment are unable to access cameras. What role do photographs play in our understanding of criminality? Much of the work has been taken from a recently discovered archive at San Quentin, and taps into the omnipresent feature of the prison within the American landscape.
26 Aesthetica
2
3
4
5
Aesthetica 27
8
6
9
7
28 Aesthetica
10
6
We Are History Somerset House, London | Until 6 February
somersethouse.org.uk The climate crisis is inextricably tied to the metrics of justice, both human and non-human. The history of carbon burning and its disastrous effects are largely thought to be connected to the Industrial Revolution. However, this momentous show at Somerset House, London, invites visitors to look further back in time – to the introduction of plantation agriculture and slavery – and consider the ripple effects throughout landscapes on a global scale. Eleven artists are featured, all of whom have personal connections to the southern hemisphere.
7
Family Matters ICP, New York | Until 10 January
icp.org “My work has always been an artist’s search for a deeper understanding of family and tribe in all its forms. There is a very thin line between the ties that bind and the ties that free, between the secrets and stories that haunt and those that provide comfort.” Gillian Laub’s Family Matters series is vulnerable and insightful, confronting ideas of privilege, tradition and unity whilst reflecting on the divisive rhetoric of the Trump administration. These images depict the ways fractured politics and opposing ideals work their way into the wider family dynamic.
8
Photo50 Business Design Centre, London | 19-23 January
londonartfair.co.uk “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” So wrote John Donne in 1624. In other words: no one can exist, truly, on their own, and we are all in need of community on some scale. Photo50, on show at London Art Fair, builds on this idea; No Place is an Island considers the premise that contemporary photography isn't an isolated medium, but one that brings in other elements of sculpture, performance and sound. Featured practitioners include Hannah Hughes, Eva Stenram, Bindi Vora and John MacLean.
9
Light Lines Royal Academy, London | Until 23 January
royalacademy.org.uk Architectural photographer Hélène Binet (b. 1959) is best-known for her long-standing professional relationship with Zaha Hadid, having captured some of the world’s most daring structures in dramatic monochrome, from the MAXXI Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome, to the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati. This retrospective reveals Binet’s sensitivity to the grandeur of built environments, focusing on sections of buildings rather than the structures as a whole, highlighting oblique planes of concrete and bold, angled surfaces.
10
After Nature Fotosiftung Schweiz, Winterthur | Until 30 January
fotostiftung.ch It is widely accepted that the world’s first photograph was taken in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, titled View from the Window at Le Gras. Niépce captured the view of the surrounding countryside in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France, with a camera obscura, projecting the image onto a pewter plate. Not long after this, photography moved across the continent. Fotosiftung Schweiz presents a major retrospective, looking over the first 50 years of photography in Switzerland, especially those that gained recognition for their pictures that took “after nature.”
1. Mont Roraima, État de Roraima, Brésil, 2018 © Sebastião Salgado / nbpictures. 2. Evan Roth, n22.210512e114.256075.hk, 2017, from the series Landscapes, 2016–ongoing, 18:00 Min., Network located video, video still © Evan Roth, Courtesy of the artist. 3. Robin Graubard. Selection from Peripheral Vision. 1979 – 2021. Digital c-print. 4 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and Office Baroque, Antwerp. 4. Tereza Zelenková, The Unseen, 2015. Gelatin silver print. Purchase funded by the Photographs Acquisition Group © Tereza Zelenková. 5. Jack Lueders-Booth, from the series Women Prisoners, MCI Framingham (Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Framingham), 1978– 85. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Kayafas, Boston. 6. Serpent River Book Extract. Courtesy of Carolina Caycedo (detail). 7. Gillian Laub, My quarantine birthday, 2020. © Gillian Laub. 8. John MacLean, Hometown of Bridget Riley, Padstow, Cornwall, 2017, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery. 9. Hélène Binet, Zaha Hadid Architects, Vitra Firestation, Weil am Rhein, Germany, 1993. Digital black-and-white silver-gelatin print, 80 x 80 cm. Courtesy ammann // projects. © Hélène Binet (detail). 10. Francis Frith, The Staubbach, c. 1862. © ETHBibliothek Zürich, Bildarchiv / Bildcode.
Aesthetica 29
art
Creating an Archive Picturing the South THE SOUTH IS ONE OF THE MOST COMPLEX REGIONS IN THE UNITED STATES. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GET 16 PHOTOGRAPHERS TO DOCUMENT THE LAND OVER 25 YEARS?
The South looms large in the American psyche. The birth- cally fractured America grappling with its divisive past. As a place of key literary, cultural, social and political leaders, it’s result of this, the High's bold commissioning project plans to also scarred by a violent history of slavery, segregation and further diversify its featured voices moving forward. The images form a provocative record of a complex part deprivation. When the world’s attention turned to the South for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, the High Museum of America. Accounting for about a third of the country geoof Art began commissioning American photographers to graphically, the South gave the world Truman Capote, Harexplore the diversity of the place and its people. A total of riet Jacobs, Bree Newsome, Johnny Cash, Alma Thomas and 16 photographers – all US citizens except for Martin Parr (b. Abraham Lincoln. Here, the Jim Crow racial segregation laws 1952) – have so far contributed more than 300 photographs were most prevalent and left the biggest imprint on society that have built up the museum’s collection. For the first time for about 100 years until the 1960s – but it’s also a rapidly since the initiative began a quarter of a century ago, a new evolving place that defies simplification. The resulting works exhibition presents all these bodies of work together, focus- examine these dualities. “Many of the photographers have ing on untold stories. “One of the things that art, and photog- taken it as an opportunity to do something that they’ve never raphy in particular, does really well is play in grey areas – in- done before, which is exciting to see,” says Harris. Jim Goldberg (b. 1953), a recipient of the current commisbetween spaces and moments,” says Curator of Photography Gregory Harris. “There’s a lot of room for the nuance and sion along with An-My Lê (b. 1960) and Sheila Pree Bright ambiguity that’s obviously everywhere, but harder to talk (b. 1967), focused on two small towns in the Arkansas Delta, one largely working class and the other predominantly white about as the country becomes increasingly polarised.” Ellen Fleurov, the founding curator of the High’s photogra- and affluent. Though only 10 miles apart, the sites reflect phy department, chose a southerner – Sally Mann (b. 1951) – cultural splits around race and class that are an open sore and two Americans from elsewhere in the country – Dawoud across America. “If I come as an outsider, I feel like I have an Bey (b. 1953) and Alex Webb (b. 1952) – to create new work opportunity to see things that other people may not, and in shot within Georgia. Two years later, Fleurov picked Richard doing that, it confronts my own biases about what a place Misrach (b. 1949), expanding the scope to the South as a may be,” says Goldberg, whose childhood was marked by whole. By granting an unusual amount of creative freedom the Civil Rights movements and the 1967 race riots in his for an institution, Picturing the South, as a broad curatorial hometown of New Haven. “I find a lot of my work is about concept, helped raise the profile of both emerging and mid- looking in the mirror.” He describes his process as “an uncovcareer artists. Today, the initiative has taken on new relevance, ering, researching and going deeper into what people say more than a year after Black Lives Matter protests in a politi- – thinking what’s behind that, and then what’s behind that.”
30 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 31
32 Aesthetica
Alec Soth, F. P., Resaca, Georgia (2006). High Museum of Art, Atlanta, commissioned with funds from Photo Forum and the Friends of Photography. © Alec Soth.
“The commissions chart a hopeful path toward healing grave injustices and suffering. The artists lead us on a courageous journey filled with uncomfortable truths to experience the region’s tragic beauty.”
Previous Page: Jim Goldberg, Hailey and Whitney, Right of Way Road, Augusta, Arkansas (2021, detail). High Museum of Art, Atlanta, commissioned with funds from the H.B. and Doris Massey Charitable Trust. Courtesy of the artist. © Jim Goldberg. Left: Kael Alford, Stranded Indian Land with Oil Boom, after the British Petroleum Oil Spill, South of Pointe-aux-Chênes, Louisiana (2010, detail). High Museum of Art, Atlanta, commissioned with funds from Paul Hagedorn, Phyllis and Sidney Rodbell, and the H. B. and Doris Massey Charitable Trust. © Kael Alford.
In addition to some colour photography, the show features a collage Goldberg created with a 27-foot strip of black and white images around which he wrote text based on local stories about the White River. He named the project Whirlpool because “the idea of tension between currents or tides is emblematic of what’s going on in the States today.” In a particularly arresting image, Hailey and Whitney, Right of Way Road, Augusta, Arkansas (2021), two young women stand together on a grass-lined street, balancing each other with the backs of their heads. “I kind of shuddered at the scene because it was so gentle in how they helped each other up as sisters and how connected they were,” Goldberg says. He began work on the series two years ago. The pandemic got in the way, so he built relationships by phone, text and email, spending about four weeks on the ground. Now, he is planning a mural featuring Polaroid collages on which members of the community can write some of their thoughts on the margins. These handwritten biographical details, a unique characteristic of Goldberg’s work, provide a very personal alternative history. His seminal 1985 book Rich and Poor, which analysed socioeconomic divides in San Francisco before the tech boom, had a similar approach. “I am cynical as fuck, but I am foolishly naive and optimistic. Even if I know it may not work, I just feel like my job is to keep making work that brings communities or people together,” he explains. Richard Misrach, who had already made his mark with landscapes of the desolate American west, focused on an industrial zone along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, dubbed “Cancer Alley.” The toxic waste from local petrochemical plants is said to disproportionately affect African American and low-income residents, leading a
group of independent UN human rights experts to brand it as a distinct form of “environmental racism.” In Swamp and Pipeline, Geismar, Louisiana (1998), a rusty pipe cuts through unnaturally turquoise wetlands. The disquieting scene points uneasily to the exact contents hiding within the tubing. Kael Alford (b. 1970) also visited areas of coastal Louisiana which have been impacted by ecological damage linked to oil and gas extraction, focusing on Native American communities. Through seven years of research, Alford discovered that she shared family heritage with the people threatened by the eroding and increasingly uninhabitable environment. Stranded Indian Land with Oil Boom, after the British Petroleum Oil Spill, South of Pointe-aux-Chênes, Louisiana (2010) depicts marshes, already battered by storms, hit by something more dismal yet: an oil spill. The waters run through grasses below a sign that reads: “Indian land: Keep out.” Sally Mann’s contribution to the commission marked a radical new direction in her career, focusing on landscapes for the first time. She had just gained major recognition – and infamy – for Immediate Family (1992), a set of intimate portraits of her husband and three children in which she probed some of the darker aspects of childhood. Motherland (1997), with its sweeping vistas of Georgia and Virginia, ultimately became a transitional project for which she used expired orthochromatic film and antique lenses before later documenting the region’s “brutal history” more deliberately. Mann’s work hangs in the same gallery as Sheila Pree Bright’s prints from the Invisible Empire (2019-2021) series. The title comes from an essay by Civil Rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, who remarked that “Georgia is beautiful. Yet on its beauty rests something disturbing and strange.” The images
Aesthetica 33
Richard Misrach, Swamp and Pipeline, Geismar, Louisiana (1998, printed 2012). High Museum of Art, Atlanta, commissioned with funds from the H. B. and Doris Massey Charitable Trust, Lucinda W. Bunnen, and High Museum of Art Enhancement Fund. © Richard Misrach.
revolve around the largest monument to the confederacy, a massive bas relief in Bright’s hometown of Stone Mountain. From her perspective as an African American woman, she plays with tension: between the natural beauty and hateful history of a place in which the Ku Klux Klan gained momentum in the early 20th century. Curator Gregory Harris, notes: “It’s two Southern women looking at the landscape and really trying to grapple with the history of the South and the marks that history has left on the landscapes. And in Sheila’s case, those marks are quite literal, in the side of that mountain.” A similarly lyrical sense of mystery, though less ominous, pervades Shane Lavalette’s (b. 1987) Will with Banjo (2011). A young man faces away from the camera as he gazes into the misty countryside. The moody scene reflects the heart of the High’s initiative: the Vermont native followed otherwise unfamiliar stories, sharing his own perspectives whilst highlighting the universality of human endeavours. The banjo player may stand in one of the most stereotyped corners of America, but people everywhere share his aspirations. Photography both highlights and breaks down such divisions. “So much of the American story is played out here and so many of the issues that we’ve grappled with for generations as a country are prevalent on the surface,” Harris says. “As a visual artist, you have a lot of material to respond to, addressing those issues of what American identity is.” Some of the participating artists deliberately take alternative routes, however. Alec Soth (b. 1969), for one, focused on survivalists and hermits. “I didn’t want my project to be ‘the South,’ because it’s way too broad and it made me queasy since I’m not from there and don’t have any kind of authoritative statement about it,” he says. Instead, Soth focused
34 Aesthetica
on people living in remote locales on the edge of society, initially calling the project Black Line in the Woods, a nod to Flannery O’Connor’s short story, A View of the Woods (1957), about a family’s deadly conflict over land ownership. Soth drove through the Georgia countryside to document Atlanta Olympics pipe bomber Eric Rudolph’s hideouts from the FBI when he came across upon a small monastery, home to just a handful of monks. The photographer’s plans changed after an encounter with a man who had been living at the reclusive site since he was a teenager. “I was thinking about the choices one makes and what it means as a young man to semi-leave society,” Soth recalls. “It was sort of this line between where society is and where something else is – a somewhat unknowable world.” Operating a large format 8 x 10 camera, Soth directed the man to stand in the woods, wearing his robes and a hat. F.P., Resaca, Georgia (2006) shows the dark figure dwarfed by thin, grey tree limbs, weak sunlight only shining far behind him. Over the space of several years, the series eventually morphed into Broken Manual (2006-2010), using tongue-in-cheek elements of fictional autobiography to develop notions of escape. After the latest wave of social and political upheaval, photographers are once again called upon to document and eternalise the unseen. The South is evolving quickly in this time of unprecedented change, one in which most Georgia voters backed a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in nearly 30 years. The High’s commissions chart a hopeful path toward healing grave injustices and suffering. The artists lead us on a courageous journey filled with uncomfortable truths about the region’s tragic beauty, allowing for a shared sense of humanity to overcome perceived differences.
Right: Shane Lavalette, Will with Banjo (2011, detail). High Museum of Art, Atlanta, commissioned with funds from Paul Hagedorn and the Friends of Photography. © Shane Lavalette.
Words Olivia Hampton
Picturing the South High Museum of Art, Atlanta Until 6 February high.org
Aesthetica 35
art
Ecological Disturbance Ingrid Weyland
“It is said that a crumpled piece of paper can never regain its original shape; the trace persists. In the same way, nature, which is disrespectfully invaded, is forever broken, and in many cases, unrecoverable.” In Topographies of Fragility, Ingrid Weyland (b. 1969) manipulates, alters and enacts “violent gestures” on the land, twisting and contorting images until the depicted landscapes become something altogether different. Weyland’s photography taps into the age of Anthropocentrism – the role of the human hand physically and dramatically shaping ecosystems from the inside out. The collages, building on the parameters of “expanded photography”, include original images from Argentina, Greenland and Iceland. The final compositions explore various layers of potential and possibility – the remnants of untouched landscapes still visible underneath the central crumple zones. ingridweyland.com.ar/en.
Ingrid Weyland, Topographies of Fragility VI. (Iceland, 2020) Collage, Digital Photography. Archival Pigment Print.
36 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 37
xx
38 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 39
Ingrid Weyland, Topographies of Fragility VIII. (Greenland, 2020). Collage, Digital Photography. Archival Pigment Print.
xx
40 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 41
Ingrid Weyland, Topographies of Fragility VII (Catamarca, Argentina, 2020). Collage, Digital Photography. Archival Pigment Print.
42 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 43
Ingrid Weyland, Topographies of Fragility IV (Catamarca, Argentina, 2019). Collage, Digital Photography. Archival Pigment Print.
44 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 45
Ingrid Weyland, Topographies of Fragility XXI. (Greenland, 2020). Collage, Digital Photography. Archival Pigment Print.
46 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 47
Ingrid Weyland, Topographies of Fragility II. (Iceland, 2019). Collage, Digital Photography. Archival Pigment Print.
art
Exploring Deep Time Noémie Goudal GOUDAL TAKES US ON A JOURNEY THROUGH OUR CURRENT GEOLOGICAL ERA AND BEYOND, HARNESSING THE PAST TO MAP THE FUTURE EFFECTS OF THE ANTHROPOCENE.
Palaeoclimatology is the study of ancient climates – those which existed before direct measurements of temperature, distance and time. Through this field, researchers look at tree rings, sediment, corals and ice cores, uncovering data which spans the Earth’s geologic ages. Certain substances can be sampled and analysed to reconstruct dramatic ecological changes and infer patterns from these. The goal: to better understand past, present and potential future environments. Michael E. Mann, from the Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science, Pennsylvania State University, notes: “There is a cautionary tale told by the hockey stick curve in the unprecedented warming that we are causing, but the lessons from the paleoclimate record of the Common Era go far beyond that. What might we infer, for example, about the role of dynamical mechanisms relevant to climate change impacts today from their past responses to natural drivers? Examples are the El Niño phenomenon, the Asian summer monsoon, and the North Atlantic Ocean ‘conveyor belt’ circulation. Are there potential ‘tipping point’ elements within these climate subsystems? How has the sea level changed in past centuries, and what does it tell us about future coastal risk? Are there natural long-term oscillations, evident in the paleoclimate record, that might compete with human-caused climate change today?” (Beyond the Hockey Stick: Climate Lessons from the Common Era, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021). Noémie Goudal (b. 1984) is a French artist who lives and works in Paris. Goudal’s practice is an investigation into photographs and films as “dialectic” images, in which the viewer
48 Aesthetica
comes into close proximity with both truth and fiction – the real and imagined. Goudal questions the potential of the image, both as a singular piece, and its various layers and possibilities of extension, through wider sequences, moving image or installation. She has been widely lauded for her investigations into the proposed Anthropocene, having been longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize in 2015 and added to the collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris; Foam Amsterdam; and Fotomuseum Winterthur. Her latest exhibition, Post Atlantica, on display at Le Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire, considers the larger narrative of Earth’s 4.543-billion-year lifespan. A: What’s the origin of the exhibition's title? NG: Atlantica was an ancient continent, which existed before it split around two billion years ago. This fracture left fragments of land that are now located on either side of the south Atlantic Ocean. I wanted to include the notion of geography and time in the title. I’ve been doing a lot of research into paleoclimatology in order to understand what might happen in the future. Scientists look at drops of water captured in rocks, pollen preserved in ice or at the bottom of lakes, palm tree fossils – all kinds of climate proxies – in relation to other types of discoveries, for example the level of carbon in a given geological era. This tells them what the climate and landscape was like 50, or even 300 million years ago. The Earth has been through some drastic changes – at one point it was covered in slime, another in ice, at another it was so full of methane and carbon dioxide that it was completely dark for hundreds of years. These past climates have left traces.
Aesthetica 49
50 Aesthetica
Noémie Goudal, Below the Deep South, (2021). Film Full HD, 11min 34s. Courtesy Edel Assanti.
“The Earth is always in movement, the tectonic plates slowly moving and dislocating, the continents spreading apart and coming together in a constant state of flux. All of this is happening so slowly that it’s almost imperceptible to us.”
Previous Page: Noémie Goudal, Phoenix V II (2021). 200 x 149,4 cm, C-Print. Courtesy Edel Assanti. Left: Noémie Goudal, Inhale Exhale (2021). Film. Production Le Grand Café - centre d'art contemporain. Courtesy Edel Assanti.
A: The prefix “post” in Atlantica indicates an immediate succession of space or time, or one concept following on from another, a kind of “before” and “after.” Photography, in itself, is a medium that’s less than 200 years old, but here we are, documenting deep geological time. How can these various timescales speak to each other? NG: For me, the photograph is very much about choosing a “cone of perspective” – in which many layers can be deconstructed, dislocated and reconstructed beyond the initial exposure. I am offering a parallel between the ways images are built, and the way scientists are looking at time through the geology. In my work, in general, I have always been looking at how, or if, it is possible to “tell time” through visuals. A: You are an artist by training, what was it like immersing yourself in the language and semantics of science? Did it feel like you were entering a whole other world? NG: It was very difficult. My brain isn't calibrated to understand that way of thinking. I started by reading more accessible articles and then I got deeper into the subject, asking questions to scientists. However, from the beginning, my work has always been about this question of time. I first became interested in the history of science, how in Antiquity, or in the Middle Ages, they understood the landscape differently because the social and religious contexts were so different from what they are now. For example, Dante Alighieri saw the world as divided into strata or layers with Hell in the Earth’s core going up to Heaven. Another 13th century thinker, Restoro d’Arezzo, thought that mountains were attracted to the stars and are pulled upwards, similar to the way that tides are formed through gravitational forces of the moon.
A: Post Atlantica is, ultimately, about the climate, albeit very much looking at the bigger picture and not the individual mechanisms of ecological damage. How do you relate to the emergency as a topic? It provides such an existential threat, it almost feels like it frames the narrative in all artistic work, whether directly referenced or not. NG: I’m interested in landscapes in the same way that land artists were in the 1970s, such as Ana Mendieta, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Looking at geography through art says something universal about human behaviour. My work isn’t about climate change or the Anthropocene, it’s an exercise in trying to understand the world in its different states. The landscape is a platform, and I raise philosophical questions about our relationship with it: now, through the past, and further back to nature’s past, with all that came before us, or any version of us. We don’t often capture how old the Earth is, and to me, the juxtaposition between “deep time” and “human time” is fascinating – the latter of which can be counted in a matter of minutes and hours. It's dizzying to think about how fast our time is running compared to the momentous scale of the planet and its systems, which span millions of years. The Earth is always in movement, the tectonic plates slowly moving and dislocating, the continents spreading apart and coming together in a constant state of flux. All of this is happening so gradually that it’s almost imperceptible to us, but in the context of the solar system, our lifespan has been the blink of an eye. I’m not trying to talk about the climate crisis directly, I’m just aware that – because we are so concerned about it – it’s the first thing that comes to viewers' minds when they look at the land in any capacity. It’s almost like now there are no other possible readings.
Aesthetica 51
Noémie Goudal, Below the Deep South,( 2021). Film Full HD, 11min 34s. Courtesy Edel Assanti.
A: It’s interesting that, at climate protests, there are numerous placards that read “Save the Planet” or “There Is No Planet B”, but, as you mention, won’t the planet just continue to exist without us, as it did before us? NG: Completely. There is a fundamental problem in our communications surrounding the crisis, and this stems from our worldview. There is no planet B – for us, and for all the species that we are destroying. The whole ecosystem we have now might completely disappear. However, other species will come back after we’ve left. If you look at the history of how the first plants and animals evolved, it’s amazing. Everything we have has come from very little. Even if the planet is uninhabitable for humans, there will be some kind of revival. A: Despite the lack of visible humans in all the compositions on display at the Saint-Nazaire show, your practice includes a kind of physical intervention in the landscape, sometimes placing mirrors or prints in-situ to produce optical illusions. How did you create these? NG: The role of intervention is extremely important, and I wish to introduce this more and more in my work moving forward. I seek to reveal and further demonstrate the fabrication, effort and mechanical gestures that have been made in order to the create the image in question. All man-made visuals are born from movement, and these come alongside our understanding of fragility, spontaneity, ephemerality and the "unexpected" that a shoot in nature – particularly with natural daylight – has to offer. For the set of images titled Phoenix (2021), it was almost like a performance. I shot the pictures in a palm tree grove at night. We had a truck with a big printer inside, so once I took
52 Aesthetica
the images, I printed and cut them into strips. I had a 200 cm x 300cm frame that was exactly the same ratio as the picture, which I placed in front of the camera and then clipped the printed strips to the frame before rephotographing the landscape once more. Closer to the camera, there’s this layer of paper, and then at the back you’ve got the real landscape. To shoot my film, Below the Deep South, I used lots of different paper backdrops in front of each other. The first was really large, right in front of the lens, and then they got smaller up until the last one, some 15 metres away from the camera. I set them alight, so they burn one after the other – it looks like it’s a never-ending landscape engulfed in flames.
Right: Noémie Goudal, Phoenix V (2021). 200 x 149.4 cm, C-Print. Courtesy Edel Assanti.
A: Your works have been described as mise en abyme, inviting viewers to participate in a kind of game revolving around perception, observation and vision. The manufactured nature of your practice, made apparent by showing Words clips or rope in the frames, comments on the limits of Rachel Segal Hamilton photographic vision. However, does it also say something about the limits of our ability to see beyond our own perspective as a species, and to our true place? NG: Yes. The scale of the planet, its ecosystems, and the Post Atlantica damage being placed on them is too big for us to grasp, Centre d’Art which is understandable because we are comparatively small. Le Grand Café I think it’s about putting yourself in a more humble position. Until 2 January And I’m talking now as a person, not just as an artist. We have to change our behaviour: to completely redefine our way of Edel Assanti, London existing on the planet, of interacting with each other and with 27 January - 12 March other living things. We thought we were strong; the pandemic has shown our fragility. However, it’s also beautiful to recon- grandcafesider our own animality, and not to feel so disconnected. saintnazaire.fr/en
Aesthetica 53
art
Lines of Production Kevin Krautgartner
The tulip is synonymous with the Netherlands – despite having first been cultivated in Turkey. Following its entrance into Europe in the 16th century, “tulip mania” became entwined with the Dutch Golden Age, as the world's first recorded financial bubble. In 2020, Dutch tulip bulb exports were valued at just over 220 million euros. Kevin Krautgartner’s In Full Bloom series captures large-scale tulip agriculture today, focusing on fields in Lisse – between Haarlem and The Hague – the heart of the flower-bulb region. Mesmerising aerial views capture the scale of production, with rows upon rows of deep maroons, yellows, whites and greens. The allure of these images is also unsettling, with lines segmenting the landscape like barcodes, signalling reduced biodiversity. Connected to the global flower trade is the fact that, by 2050, scientists estimate there will be no habitat left for wild tulips, with all future cultivation relying on human intervention. kevinkrautgartner.com.
Kevin Krautgartner, from the series In Full Bloom (2019). Lisse, Netherlands. Courtesy of the artist.
54 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 55
Kevin Krautgartner, from the series In Full Bloom (2019). Lisse, Netherlands. Courtesy of the artist.
56 Aesthetica
Kevin Krautgartner, from the series In Full Bloom (2019). Lisse, Netherlands. Courtesy of the artist.
Aesthetica 57
Kevin Krautgartner, from the series In Full Bloom (2019). Lisse, Netherlands. Courtesy of the artist.
58 Aesthetica
Kevin Krautgartner, from the series In Full Bloom (2019). Lisse, Netherlands. Courtesy of the artist.
Aesthetica 59
Kevin Krautgartner, from the series In Full Bloom (2019). Lisse, Netherlands. Courtesy of the artist.
60 Aesthetica
Kevin Krautgartner, from the series In Full Bloom (2019). Lisse, Netherlands. Courtesy of the artist.
Aesthetica 61
Kevin Krautgartner, from the series In Full Bloom (2019). Lisse, Netherlands. Courtesy of the artist.
62 Aesthetica
Kevin Krautgartner, from the series In Full Bloom (2019). Lisse, Netherlands. Courtesy of the artist.
Aesthetica 63
art
Journey into Colour Kate Theo
Colour-blocking has been a huge source of inspiration for artists and designers since the early 20th century, pairing complementary shades and producing strong visual contrasts. Bold palettes can be found everywhere, and they continue to influence culture at large, from Mondrian’s rectangles and Warhol’s silkscreens to Pantone’s colours of the year charts. Kate Theo (b. 1979) is a graphic designer based in Puglia, Italy, whose images are defined by block backgrounds, each frame created around the ethos of “essentials and simplicity.” The characters are placed in surreal worlds, subject to their own laws of gravity. Whilst concentric circles hover like ellipses, butterfly cages, golden frames and curtains shroud figures from our view. In each vignette, the backgrounds draw the eye as they consume and juxtapose against their characters. Theo reflects upon the role that colour plays, both internally and externally, as it is embedded in visual culture. instagram.com/katetheo79.
Kate Theo, Untitled. (2021) Courtesy of the artist.
64 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 65
Kate Theo, Untitled. (2021) Courtesy of the artist.
66 Aesthetica
Kate Theo, Untitled. (2021) Courtesy of the artist.
Aesthetica 67
Kate Theo, Untitled. (2021) Courtesy of the artist.
68 Aesthetica
Kate Theo, Untitled. (2021) Courtesy of the artist.
Aesthetica 69
Kate Theo, Untitled. (2021) Courtesy of the artist.
70 Aesthetica
Kate Theo, Untitled. (2021) Courtesy of the artist.
Aesthetica 71
Kate Theo, Untitled. (2021) Courtesy of the artist.
72 Aesthetica
Kate Theo, Untitled. (2021) Courtesy of the artist.
Aesthetica 73
Kate Theo, Untitled. (2021) Courtesy of the artist.
74 Aesthetica
Kate Theo, Untitled. (2021) Courtesy of the artist.
Aesthetica 75
art
Ethics of Consumption Foto/Industria THE 2021 EDITION OF FOTO/INDUSTRIA OFFERS A PROVOCATIVE GLIMPSE AT WHAT WE EAT, HOW IT’S PRESENTED AND ITS CULTURAL IMPACT, FROM THE FIELD TO THE TABLE.
It took human history until around 1800 for world popula- per cent of their protein (Environmental Health Perspection to reach one billion. The second billion was achieved in tives, 2017). Feeding 10 billion people safely and sustain130 years (1930), the third billion in 30 (1960), the fourth ably means reconceiving our food systems altogether. Or billion in 15 (1974), and the fifth billion in only 13 years maybe it’s more accurate to say we’ll need to redress those (1987). Currently we’re pushing eight billion, and if things systems further still, because most of us have only a hazy keep going as expected, the global population will reach 10 idea of contemporary food production methods today. Food billion by 2050. These figures are having a huge effect on advertising and packaging usually emphasises “natural” or traditional methods of farming and agriculture, but the refood production, which has industrialised to meet demand. We are already seeing the impact of this, however. Forests ality is very different. As Francesco Zanot (b. 1979), Artistic are being cleared to create agricultural space at around 10 Director of Foto/Industria notes: “Food is so multi-layered, million hectares per year (according to the UN FAO). This is but it’s always treated in a superficial way. We wanted to look decreasing biodiversity and removing the buffers protecting at it without looking at the easiest side. So, there’s no food humans from animal-borne viruses such as COVID-19 (a fact photography, nothing really related to cooking.” Instead, Foto/Industria takes a cooler, more critical apstated by the UN Environment Programme in July 2020.) Deforestation is also contaminating water, soil, plants and proach, exploring packaging, for example, in a show devoted animals, and contributing to global warming (at a rate cur- to Ando Gilardi’s (1921-2012) archive of images, an eccentric rently projected at 2.4°C despite 2030 pledges at COP26), collection that speaks of food’s presentation and position in which increases flooding, drought and storms and – ironi- Italian culture and society. Foto/Industria also includes phocally – increasing food insecurity. Boosting food production tographs of traditional farming and hunting, but they’re via with harmful pesticides is polluting the land and water, fur- Herbert List’s (1903-1975) Favignana, unappetising images ther destabilising ecosystems and causing acute poisoning of tuna fishing in 1950s Italy, or Takashi Homma’s (b. 1962) for 25 million people per year (BMC Public Health, 2020). Trails, candid images of blood left by Japanese hunters. Other exhibitions shed light on mass production from the It’s a bleak picture, and one that forms the curatorial focus 21st century. Mishka Henner (b. 1976) has collected satellite for Foto/Industria, a biennale across 10 venues in Bologna. In the future, we’ll need to produce more food, and that images of feedlots, for example, American megafarms on task is increasing in difficulty. Harvard University’s School which hundreds of thousands of cattle are reared, living on of Public Health estimates that when stable crops are ex- a diet of mainly of maize, protein, supplements (often made posed to the predicted levels of CO2, they will lose up to from other cattle) and drugs. These livestock do very little 10 per cent of their zinc, five per cent of their iron, and eight exercise, and are heavy enough to be slaughtered at 12-18
76 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 77
78 Aesthetica
Jan Groover, Senza titolo / Untitled circa 1978. © Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne – Jan Groover Archives.
“The biennale is more months; the traditional age being four to five years. Mean- Seed Library. This series documents intervention on a small about food as an inwhile, Henk Wildschut’s (b. 1967) Food explores the role of scale – a local attempt to reintroduce ancient seeds and dustry, as it touches information technology and mechanisation in Dutch live- plants to farms, which addresses both the reduced diversity on so many areas stock. The images are a clash between farm, factory and lab. in crops and ecosystems, and the loss of land in Palestine. Comparable themes underpin Lorenzo Vitturi’s Money – ecology, biology, “[The biennale] is more about food as an industry, as it economics, politics, touches on so many areas – ecology, biology, economics, Must be Made (2017), a series made in Nigeria at the invitaanthropology and politics, anthropology and history,” explains Zanot. “Ecolo- tion of the African Artists’ Foundation. Vitturi worked in Lagos’ history. Ecology is a gy is a recurring topic, but we could also have made a whole rambling Balogun market, one of the world’s largest street recurring topic, but event on the politics of food. We wanted to go deeper into markets where pretty much anything is for sale, from clothes we could also have all of these different topics.” As such, the exhibitions also tap and electrical appliances to ingredients and takeaways. Vitmade a whole event into how our desires are stimulated and manipulated. Zanot turi was inherently interested in Balogun’s multiculturalism on the politics of food.” has paired Homma’s Trails with another series by the same because, whilst the fresh food and produce was local, many
Previous Page: Yam, Calabashes, Aso-oke, Egg and Pink Sponge (2017) © Lorenzo Vitturi. Courtesy T293, Roma. Left: 16th Floor Aerial View #2 (2017) © Lorenzo Vitturi. Courtesy of the artist.
photographer titled M, which depicts various branches of McDonald’s restaurants all around the world (to wit: there are nearly 40,000 in total). The contrasts between these two series is posed and considered: Trails reflects a close relationship between human and prey, in which the death of the animal is brutally, but authentically, obvious, whilst M documents a kind of fantasy environment, in which meat is processed into standardised patties with few discernible links to the natural world. In the red and yellow cardboard boxes, the identities of the animals are completely erased. M highlights globalisation and consumerism at large, like the buildings in Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s seminal 1972 photobook Learning from Las Vegas, McDonald’s restaurants function, in entirety, as advertisements. These buildings offer a familiar, standardised form, in which familiar, standardised food is available. There’s a political edge here about diversity and monocultures, and this notion also comes across in another of Foto/ Industria’s exhibitions by Vivien Sansour, Palestine Heirloom
other items had been made in China, even traditional fabrics. Vitturi interviewed vendors from the stalls, taking snippets from these conversations and weaving them into Aso-oke fabric (references that included the pithy series title). He also sent objects and fabrics back to his studio in London, where he assembled them into otherworldly still lifes, divorced from their environment and made all the more haunting. However, Money Must be Made also references the power imbalances inherent in these societies, and logistics, too, because Vitturi also chose to make images in Financial Trust House, an abandoned skyscraper right in the middle of Balogun market. “This building was constructed for offices, mostly for western banks or companies such as KLM Royal Dutch Airlines,” says Zanot. “At the beginning it was full, but gradually these companies started to leave, and as they went away, the stalls continued to expand. Lagos is very much gentrified, but in this case, the gentrification didn’t work, and the locals won. You can see it as a form of resistance – finally the building died and gave in to the surrounding vendors.”
Aesthetica 79
Praying Mat Fragments, Pink Soap, Egg and Coconut Oil (2017). © Lorenzo Vitturi. Courtesy of the artist.
Vitturi’s pictures suggest something similar, contrasting Groover show] there are many paintings which inspired her,” grey shots of dusty bottles and artefacts abandoned in the he explains. “There’s a really interesting dialogue here.” Groover’s installation has also been configured as a dotower with overviews of the market, which is colourful, busy and unmistakeably vibrant. One of the photographs in- mestic space, calling upon the aesthetics of the home – a cludes a sign advertising “Ecobank – The Pan African Bank”, fun touch which runs through other aspects of Foto/Industria a company set up in 1985 as a very deliberate alternative to 2021. The catalogue is not a catalogue per se, for example, the many western banks in operation in Africa. “The market it’s a wayward cross between a photobook and a cookbook is chaotic, but it also has its own order,” says Zanot. “The which includes images by the artists, alongside recipes by chef and writer Tommaso Melilli, and philosophical musings people going there to buy stuff know how it works.” If Vitturi’s still lifes suggest an alienated view of the objects on everything from the ethics of meat-eating to the shift he photographs, then American artist Jan Groover’s (1943- from Medieval to modern conventions of fine dining. This exhibition programme was partly inspired by Filippo 2012) lauded Kitchen Still Lifes does something similar for everyday utensils and crockery. Groover started the work in Tommaso Marinetti's 1932 publication The Futurist Cook1978, shooting at home in her kitchen and showing unre- book, which took aim at icons of Italian cuisine just as Musmarkable items as a series of colours, shapes and abstracted solini was ramping up nationalist discourse. The cookbook forms. Groover initially trained as a painter and was inspired was at the intersection of food and the arts, featuring contriby some of the masters she studied – Caravaggio, Cezanne butions from the likes of Andy Warhol and Liberace as well and Giorgio Morandi. In her work, however, she replaced fruit as Lewis Carroll and Alice B. Toklas, amongst others. The publication was a cultural phenomenon, sitting somewhere and musical instruments with cups, forks, knives and plates. Groover’s motivation for doing so is intriguing. It’s been in- between comedy, culture and manifesto. As Marinetti wrote: terpreted in terms of a feminist protest, given that the kitchen “It is not by chance this work is published during a world is a traditional locus for “female work”, but it might also be economic crisis, which has clearly inspired a dangerous deread as a comment on consumerism – on the dream kitchen pressing panic, though its future direction remains unclear. that’s the biggest investment in most homes. Zanot points We propose an antidote to this panic: optimism at the table.” Foto/Industria taps into this rhetoric in a curatorial vision out, however, that Groover didn’t set out these connections, opting “not to close down any possibilities. You can also read that’s both satirical and radical, especially given the setting: it in a very formal way,” he says. “She was into the idea of “Emilia-Romagna is very much connected to food – Parmireducing genres.” As such, the team is pleased to be exhibit- giano Reggiano, tagliatelle, Prosciutto di Parma – symbols ing her images in Bologna’s Musei MAMbo, a building which of Italian cuisine,” says Zanot. “And in some cases, we're talkalso houses the permanent collection of the Museo Morandi. ing about big brands. Doing this in Bologna is quite a pro“Giorgio Morandi was from Bologna, so upstairs [from the vocative statement. It’s not presenting food in an easy way.”
80 Aesthetica
Right: Jan Groover, Senza titolo / Untitled circa 1988-1989. © Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne – Jan Groover Archives.
Words Diane Smyth
Foto/Industria Fondazione MAST, Bologna Until 28 November fotoindustria.it/en
Aesthetica 81
art
From the Orchard Odd Apples
Apples, as visual iconographies, are deeply embedded into western culture, from the Bible and Magritte to the logos on the backs of our smartphones. Green apples, in particular, have had weighted cultural significance, starting with the Italian Annurca specimen, first mentioned by Pliny, author of the world’s first encyclopaedia, before 79 AD. Today, it is estimated that there are 7,500 varieties of apple, a fact that has captivated photographer William Mullan and designer Andrea A. Trabucco-Campos. The Odd Apples series contains 90 still lifes, representing four years and three seasons of researching, reading, finding, tasting and photographing. In these surreal, and sometimes farcical images, Mullan and Trabucco-Campos offer hyper-stylised aesthetics, focusing on the fruit that has symbolised knowledge and power – both literally and metaphorically – for centuries. Odd Apples is published by Hatje Cantz Verlag. hatjecantz.de | oddapples.photo.
Kandil Sinap (Anatolia or Crimea). From the series Odd Apples. Photographer: William Mullen. Designer: A.A. Trabucco-Campos.
82 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 83
Pink Pearl (California, USA). From the series Odd Apples. Photographer: William Mullen. Designer: A.A. Trabucco-Campos.
84 Aesthetica
xx
Porter’s Perfection (Somerset, England). From the series Odd Apples. Photographer: William Mullen. Designer: A.A. Trabucco-Campos.
Aesthetica 85
No Blow (New Hampshire, USA). From the series Odd Apples. Photographer: William Mullen. Designer: A.A. Trabucco-Campos.
86 Aesthetica
xx
Trail (Ontario, Canada). From the series Odd Apples. Photographer: William Mullen. Designer: A.A. Trabucco-Campos.
Aesthetica 87
Red St. Lawrence (Maine, USA). From the series Odd Apples. Photographer: William Mullen. Designer: A.A. Trabucco-Campos.
88 Aesthetica
xx
Hidden Rose (Oregon, USA). From the series Odd Apples. Photographer: William Mullen. Designer: A.A. Trabucco-Campos.
Aesthetica 89
Geneva (Ontario, Canada). From the series Odd Apples. Photographer: William Mullen. Designer: A.A. Trabucco-Campos.
90 Aesthetica
xx
Black Oxford (Maine, USA). From the series Odd Apples. Photographer: William Mullen. Designer: A.A. Trabucco-Campos.
Aesthetica 91
xx
Otterson (New York, USA). From the series Odd Apples. Photographer: William Mullen. Designer: A.A. Trabucco-Campos.
92 Aesthetica
Firecracker (Oregon, USA). From the series Odd Apples. Photographer: William Mullen. Designer: A.A. Trabucco-Campos.
Aesthetica 93
art
Acts of Preservation David Benjamin Sherry THESE HYPERREAL IMAGES CHALLENGE THE TRADITIONS OF AMERICAN WESTERN LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY IN AN ERA OF SOCIAL, ECOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL CRISIS.
On 28 December 2016, Barack Obama made an official values the splendour of Utah more than the people of Utah presidential proclamation, establishing Bears Ears, San Juan – and no one knows better how to use it.” David Benjamin County, Utah, as a National Monument. He stated: “Rising Sherry’s (b. 1981) American Monuments series, shot in hyperfrom the center of the southeastern Utah landscape and vis- real monochrome, was created in the same year, exploring ible from every direction are twin buttes so distinctive that in and engaging with the sites that were being threatened by each of the native languages of the region their name is the Trump’s administration. The images were taken as a form of same: Hoon'Naqvut, Shash Jaa', Kwiyagatu Nukavachi, Ansh photographic activism, with saturated colour palettes alertAn Lashokdiwe, or "Bears Ears." Abundant rock art, ancient ing viewers to a sense of danger – of human intervention cliff dwellings, ceremonial sites, and countless other artifacts stepping onto these iconic terrains – whilst preserving the provide an extraordinary archaeological and cultural record natural beauty of the landscapes through the camera lens. that is important to us all, but most notably the land is proA: Where did your journey into photography begin? foundly sacred to many Native American tribes. “All federal lands and interests in lands within the bounda- DBS: The first pictures I made (that had any importance for ries of the monument are hereby appropriated and withdrawn me) were of landscapes immediately following the death of from all forms of entry, location, selection, sale, or other dis- a very close friend in 2007. I had ventured out west for the position under the public land laws or laws applicable to the first time during a particularly dark moment, but that’s often US Forest Service, from location, entry, and patent under the the way things seem to turn out – something so difficult and mining laws, and from disposition under all laws relating to senseless ultimately led to my life’s work and passion. mineral and geothermal leasing, other than by exchange A: Your artistic career has, in your own words, been centhat furthers the protective purposes of the monument.” By the end of 2017, the Trump administration had made tered on “challenging and reinvigorating the American a counter-proclamation, reducing the monument’s size by western landscape tradition.” How is your work a re85%, from 1,351,849 acres to 201,876 acres. This was seen sponse to the practitioners that have come before you? as a victory for Republican officials and energy companies, DBS: As a queer person, with a staunch commitment to who were interested in the land for the excavation of fossil broadening representation and weaving the fight for envifuels and uranium. Bears Ears was just one of 27 national ronmental and social justice into everything that I do, I try monuments that were called for review, with combined modi- to celebrate liminal spaces as well as marginalised peoples. fications totalling more than 1.2 million acres. At a press In doing so, I incorporate what has been missing for so long conference on 4 December 2017, Trump exclaimed: “No one in the straight white male-dominated tradition of my genre.
94 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 95
96 Aesthetica
David Benjamin Sherry, The Wave on the Coyote Buttes, Paria Canyon, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah (2013). Courtesy of the Artist and Salon 94, New York © David Benjamin Sherry.
“Colour is a conduit for magic, mysticism and history. The dramatic size and colouration of the print provides an additional layer akin to my experience travelling through these spiritual places and witnessing the spectacles firsthand.”
Previous Page: David Benjamin Sherry, Escalante River, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah (2018). Chromogenic print. Courtesy of the Artist and Salon 94, New York © David Benjamin Sherry. Left: David Benjamin Sherry, Sunrise on Pilot Rock, Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, Oregon, (2017). Chromogenic print. Courtesy of the Artist and Salon 94, New York © David Benjamin Sherry.
A: Colour has played an integral role in many of your other series, with previous collections ruminating around block pinks, greens, blues and yellows, accentuating the cross-sections of rugged natural material. Is colour part of a wider visual transformation? Do you see this as a positive or negative? Does it need to be either? DBS: Colour is a conduit for all magic, mysticism and history. The dramatic size and colouration of the print provides an additional layer akin to my experience travelling through these spiritual places and witnessing the spectacles firsthand. The palettes offer new perspectives in recognition and meaning for these already well-documented landscapes. A: Given that these colours are artificially manufactured, how do you see the role of the photographer, and in extension, humanity, in looking, seeing and documenting the planet? As humans, especially those existing in the global north, are we one and the same, or will we always be separate – observers and prospectors of nature? DBS: Maybe it’s not an intervention. Conservationist Terry Tempest Williams wrote an essay for my latest book, describing how it felt for her to first encounter one of my photographs. What she wrote really resonated with me: “I simply stared in recognition. It wasn’t the dunes that held my gaze, it was the colour pink. It was as if someone had exposed the secret of seeing, locating the essence of the land from the inside out. My body doesn’t lie, I started shaking. This is what I have come to know from living in the desert. There is a vibrational quality of landforms that registers through colors, both seen and felt like animated heat waves. Once, after a long meditation, I looked up and the La Sal Mountains had
turned magenta. If I were to use the word “aura” you might find me soft-headed, but I am sharing my revelations of residency as I understand them: nothing is as it appears. Auras in the desert are real. A cottonwood tree on the edge of the river translates to orange from the reflective light ricocheting off sandstone cliffs. On another day, the cottonwood is shimmering green from the pulse of its own chlorophyll, and the goosenecks of the San Juan River can be as violet in encore light, after the sun sets through the gauze of clouds, as the purple locoweed and penstemon blooming on the eroding terraces below. Sherry’s photographs are not a mirage or a sensation. They are alchemical images that reveal the hidden truths brought into sharp focus at this moment in time.” A: To further these ideas, how does American Monuments perhaps tap into this sense of voyeurism – of certain individuals seeing the land for its financial potential? How do the jewel-like colours feed into the idea of prosperity or “richness” in the land, waiting to be excavated? DBS: I definitely try to convey a sense of intrinsic value with my landscapes. I think that environmentalist Bill McKibben best describes the kind of “worth”: “Somehow the saturated and unsettling colors of Sherry’s photographs of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, in Utah and the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, in New Mexico, amongst other western vistas, help us see all that splendour, all that history, and all those politics more clearly, or at least glimpse that something has gone wrong and is now going more wrong in these places that have long been a comforting part of the landscape of the mind. No longer retreats or redoubts from the overwhelming bleat of our wired
Aesthetica 97
David Benjamin Sherry, View from Muley Point II, Bears Ears National Monument, Utah (2018). Chromogenic print. Courtesy of the Artist and Salon 94, New York © David Benjamin Sherry.
world, they are contested places. We must fight to make sense of them, and we must fight to preserve them, and we must fight to make sure that in their preservation they connect us back to the people who wandered them originally.” A: When these monuments were threatened by the Trump administration and its supporters, to what degree was this work about preservation, and if so, for whom? DBS: The work was entirely about preservation – for me and the people of the United States, as well as its many visitors. These are public lands, which are meant to be used by all people of the USA and beyond. However, I’d also say that I’d personally like to see most of these lands, especially Bears Ears monument, given entirely back to the Indigenous people that have lived amongst them for generations. A: You’ve noted that your practice, whilst expressing a deep concern for the climate and destructive anthropogenic acts, is also about “sustaining a queer sensibility in the hetero-male dominated canon of landscape photography.” Can you expand upon this? In what ways are you redefining queer aesthetics, or questioning power structures that have been damaging to humans and nonhumans – the planet and LGBTQIA communities? DBS: Much of my work, which began as an homage to the grand western landscape photographic legacy, evolved into an opportunity to build upwards. As a queer person retracing my forebears’ footsteps, I became increasingly aware of my own dialogue with this colonial, heteronormative history of the medium, and through this, I felt a renewed sense of purpose. And yes, the forces that seek to subvert “others” are
98 Aesthetica
one and the same with the destructive forces of capitalism that destroy and manipulate the natural world for profit. A: In many ways, the climate crisis has been defined by binary thinking: of an “all or nothing” narrative. American politics have similarly been completely polarised, on this issue and many others. How far is your practice about breaking down these structures, creating nuanceand seeing the world in diverse and captivating ways? DBS: Nuance and compromise can be good, but art is a sphere in which “all or nothing” thinking is useful, even necessary at times. Compromise is not getting us where we need to go fast enough. Thankfully, I’m not a politician who has to work with an inherently broken system to get anything done. A: In October 2021, President Joe Biden restored the monuments to their original protected state, as laid out in the governmental declaration by Barack Obama. Does this change your view of the images and the series? DBS: Yes, Biden has restored the monuments back to their original protected state … for now. However, I believe that all wild places are endangered. We are all endangered. The images continue to have power for me – as the contested lands are changing as we speak. What happens when another elected official takes office and does what Trump did? A: What’s next for you, in this medium or otherwise? DBS: I’ve started painting. Seeing the natural world slowly being destroyed has been too painful – that along with the end of analogue technologies to produce images. Painting is offering something new and I'm enjoying the freedom.
Right: David Benjamin Sherry, Grand Plateau, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah (2017). Chromogenic print. Courtesy of the Artist and Salon 94, New York © David Benjamin Sherry.
Words Kate Simpson
Earth in Peril: David Benjamin Sherry, Wave Hill, New York Until 5 December wavehill.org davidbenjaminsherry.com
Aesthetica 99
art
Worlds Transformed Karen Constine
The human eye can only detect light (and, in turn, colour) from wavelengths in the range of 400 to 700 nanometres (nm). Infrared light sits outside of this spectrum, with much longer wavelengths that remain invisible. Karen Constine reveals this world, subverting the Los Angeles landscape using an infrared camera (665nm). Deserted suburban streets are transformed into hallucinogenic planes. The images are beguiling, with greens expanded into pinks: hedges like spun candy-floss; palms like flamingo feathers. Here, Constine explores the realms between façade and reality. She notes: “Prepandemic, the streets of Los Angeles were decidedly at odds. Increasing homelessness, changing demographics and rapid gentrification were in motion, but, this was still the movie backlot of the world – a pretend land, a place for dreamers. During long walks in the time of Covid, the city revealed a new self.” karenconstinephotography.com.
Covid LA, Day 168, 3:54pm (detail) ©Karen Constine.
100 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 101
102 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 103
Covid LA, Day 149, 4:58pm (detail) ©Karen Constine.
104 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 105
Covid LA, Day 62, 9:16am (detail) ©Karen Constine
106 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 107
Covid LA, Day 62, 8:09am (detail) ©Karen Constine
108 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 109
Covid LA, Day 149, 5:10pm (detail) ©Karen Constine
110 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 111
Covid LA, Day 62, 9:26am (detail) ©Karen Constine
art
Satirical Photomontage Lexicon Love
“I am drawn to the unsettling, and try to inject it into my work where possible, seeking out connections between humour and tragedy. At first glance, these emotions might not seem to go together, but their relationship is complicated and, ultimately, one cannot survive without the other. It is in combining the two that true magic begins.” Harriet Moutsopoulos (aka Lexicon Love) produces digital collages that renegotiate and manipulate the origins of images – provoking, teasing and confusing the viewer. Comedic, yet distinctly satirical, these pieces challenge traditional notions of beauty, whilst tapping into the intimacy, security, and at times, revulsion, that food and everyday objects conjure. Despite broad cultural references, the compositions are based upon subtle visual suggestion. She notes: “I employ a self-imposed ban on using any more than two, and on the rare occasion three, elements.” lexiconlove.com.
Harriet Moutsopoulos, I Came Here On My Own (2020). From the series No Game To Play. Courtesy of the artist.
112 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 113
114 Aesthetica
Harriet Moutsopoulos, The Breeding of a Jackass (2020). From the series Annus Horribilis. Courtesy of the artist.
Aesthetica 115
Harriet Moutsopoulos, Failure in the Kitchen (2020). From the series Amaranthine. Courtesy of the artist.
116 Aesthetica
Harriet Moutsopoulos, Burnt the Bibles (2020). From the series Corned Beef. Courtesy of the artist.
Aesthetica 117
Harriet Moutsopoulos, We Want the One You Call McNeal (2020). From the series Corned Beef. Courtesy of the artist.
118 Aesthetica
Harriet Moutsopoulos, The Escape Route (2019). From the series Ice Where It's Bruised. Courtesy of the artist.
Aesthetica 119
Harriet Moutsopoulos, Krios (2019). From the series Blue Money. Courtesy of the artist.
120 Aesthetica
Harriet Moutsopoulos, Uncomfortably Numb (2018). From the series Real and Imagined. Courtesy of the artist.
Aesthetica 121
Harriet Moutsopoulos, The Mother of Invention (2019). From the series Ice Where It's Bruised. Courtesy of the artist.
122 Aesthetica
Harriet Moutsopoulos, Haughty Holly (2020). From the series Corned Beef. Courtesy of the artist.
Aesthetica 123
Harriet Moutsopoulos, Lorem Ipsum (2020). From the series Amaranthine. Courtesy of the artist.
reviews
Exhibition Reviews
1
In The Street HELEN LEVITT
Helen Levitt (1913-2009) was one of the most influential street photographers and filmmakers in New York in the 20th century. She started photographing the residents of Lower East Side, The Bronx and Spanish Harlem in the 1930s, inspired by meeting French humanist photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. In The Street is a major retrospective of Levitt’s trajectory and artistic practice, featuring around 140 prints, artist books and an eponymous documentary made in collaboration with Janice Loeb in 1948. The show, organised into themes including Children At Play and Street As Stage, includes portraits on the New York Subway, and a foray into colour photography between the 1960s and 1970s. Levitt captured the daily lives and interactions of people through the economic crises of the 1920s and 1930s, and the aftermath of WWII. However, she didn’t consider herself
to be offering social commentary; rather, photography was a means of expression through which she gave her models power. Levitt’s subjects exhibit camaraderie, community, and in some cases, apathy. They are never victimised. As the documentary notes: “The streets of the poor quarters of great cities are, above all, a theatre and a battleground.” Words The influence of Surrealism can be seen moving through Shyama Laxman the show, and is particularly evident in Levitt's photographs of children. Through individual actions and gestures, these young people mimic the adult world, whether “smoking” cig- The Photographers' arettes, or playing with guns to fight a pretend enemy. Gallery, London Anna Dannemann, one of the show’s curators, succinctly Until 13 February sums up Levitt's wider relevance: “We are looking at characters, at people, and how they behave – how they act on the thephotographersgallery. streets in a certain time. And we can all connect to that.” org.uk
2
Champú VINCENT DELBROUCK
What’s on show at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, is not a traditional representation of Cuba. The galleries host the latest project by Belgian photographer Vincent Delbrouck (b. 1975), Champú, realised in the Caribbean island from 2014 onwards. The exhibition gathers 100 photographs as a travel journal, accompanied by a self-published photobook. Delbrouck has visited Cuba several times since the 1990s, absorbing the beauty of simple objects and of individuals. However, he wanted to challenge the imagery that surrounds Cuba – depictions of exoticism or economic and political crisis – and share a fresh energy through the lens. A group of local teenagers form some of the main protagonists on display, belonging to a generation which doesn’t want to surrender to a hopeless future. In Delbrouck’s photos, these invdividuals appropriate natural and artificial spaces,
such as in Lazaro at the river (2018), or in Carla on the Balcony (2020). Spaces become theirs, paradoxically in a country where private ownership doesn’t exist. Delbrouck calls these teenagers by name – those who welcomed him generously. As result, he gets close and depicts them with an incredible intimacy and palpable authenticity. We see human bodies, covered in piercings and tattoos, caught laughing, kissing, smoking and drinking, regularly at the park or the beach. Alongside these searing portraits are a series of peaceful and silent still lifes, including Yellow curtain (2019), and Red stairs (2020). Delbrouck explores architecture and light using vivid colours and shapes in immersive painting-like compositions. These visual languages are also enriched by writing from a Facebook page, a series of posts speaking about the unique experience of falling in love for the first time.
Words Monica de Vidi
Huis Marseille, Amsterdam Until 5 December huismarseille.nl
3
Care | Contagion | Community 10 ARTIST COMMISSIONS
“We know that grief changes your sense of time, but it also mould. Yet the rich nebula of moss that coats these objects changes your sense of seeing.” Othello De'Souza-Hartley’s – a visual pun on bacterial culture (mould) and societal cultriptych, three prints simply titled absence (2020), is accom- ture (mementos) – brilliantly subsumes the notion that we panied by a caption from the poet Raymond Antrobus. It are anything but touch-tight in our proximity to one another. Contagion literally means “being together” and “to touch”, perfectly describes the fraught intimacy on display at Autograph, London, as 10 artists re-tread the tight quarters of the curators remark. If contagion can dispossess care and quarantine and examine the effects that isolation and illness community of these terms, then the artists demonstrate the paradox that what kills us, in this case, is the antidote. Words have had on our lives, in many cases permanently. Like judging an object under the microscope, it is difficult De'Souza-Hartley, who lost their father to Covid-19, sepa- Jack Solloway to discern how our sense of seeing has changed as a whole, rates a figure across three pictures, disconnecting their legs because of our inherent proximity to crisis. Poulomi Desai’s from their torso as the middle image of an empty room inpetri dish art, Our cultures are the portals – the gateways be- tervenes. It’s an exceptionally moving portrayal of grief. For Autograph, London tween one world and the next (2020) takes this idea literally, Antrobus, visualising loss allows us to “find lighter ways to Until 12 February obscuring photos, newspaper cuttings and a passage from hold what weighs us down.” Several artists here are beginHindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, with colourful blooms of ning to give language to this difficult, yet shared, process. autograph.org.uk
124 Aesthetica
1. Helen Levitt, New York, 1980 © Film Documents LLC. Courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne. 2a. Vincent Delbrouck, The Plant, 2020. Courtesy Stieglitz19. 2b. Vincent Delbrouck, Afternoon, 2018. Courtesy Stieglitz19. 3. Sonal Kantaria, Dharti. From the commission Ghar, 2020. © and Courtesy of the artist. Commissioned by Autograph for Care | Contagion | Community — Self & Other.
1
2a 3
2b
Aesthetica 125
5a
6
126 Aesthetica
5b
4. Lola Álvarez Bravo, En su propia cárcel (In Her Own Prison), c. 1950, gelatin silver print image: 18.42 x 21.27 cm (7 1/4 x 8 3/8 in.) frame: 50.8 x 45.72 cm (20 x 18 in.) frame (outer): 53.34 x 48.26 cm (21 x 19 in.) Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser © Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation. 5a. Yuki San, March 2020, from the series Hakanai Sonzai, by Pierre-Elie de Pibrac (c) Pierre-Elie de Pibrac. 5b. Sanae San, July 2020, from the series Hakanai Sonzai, by Pierre-Elie de Pibrac (c) Pierre-Elie de Pibrac. 6. Phyllis Christopher. Castro Street Fair, San Francisco, CA, 1989. Giclee print. © Phyllis Christopher.
4
4
The New Woman Behind the Camera 120 PHOTOGRAPHERS
Bold and daring, the concept of the “New Woman” ruffled more than a few feathers, emerging in Japan, Australia, Europe and the USA in the first half of the 20th century. Women photographers, who followed their calling in a maledominated field, embodied revolutionary ideals of female empowerment. The work of more than 120 artists from over 20 countries, on view at the National Gallery of Art, shows just how far women pushed the medium during a particularly fraught period marked by war, fascism, communism, economic depression and struggles for decolonisation. Ré Soupault (1901-1996), who wrote for magazines and launched a fashion label in Paris, superimposed an image of an unfolded newspaper with one of herself exuding confidence, leaning against a desk wearing trousers and a blazer, with a cigarette in one hand for the double exposure Self-portrait, Tunis (1939). In another composite image, Wanda Wulz
(1903-1984), printed negatives of herself and the family cat on the same sheet of paper for the surreal Cat + I (1932). Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903-1993), widely considered Mexico’s first female photographer, played with shadows that formed a virtual cage to illustrate the limitations placed on women like the one portrayed with In Her Own Prison (c. 1950). Many of the featured prints were created in a problematic historical and social context. The Nazi Party commissioned their unoffficial film auteur Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) to cover the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics. Meanwhile, works from Tsuneko Sasamoto (b. 1914) – a one-time propaganda photographer for imperialist regimes in Japan – are also on display in the gallery. Whilst these artists made undeniable strides in breaking down gender barriers in their respective fields, their roles in supporting violent regimes and incendiary, divisive rhetoric may outweigh any such achievements.
Words Olivia Hampton
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC Until 30 January nga.gov
5
Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize THREE SHORTLISTED ARTISTS
The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2021 invites strong and beautiful.” This hope is verified by everyone picaudiences to consider what makes us human. Is it difference? tured: Merna Beasley, Mildred Burns, Shirley Ann Mcpherson Is it in our similarities? In the ways we connect to one an- and Gloria Campbell. Their stances and facial expressions other? How can we be both so simple and so complex? It is tell a thousand tales of power and resilience between them. Meanwhile, second prize was awarded to Pierre-Elie de no surprise that the 54 shortlisted submissions ring true to the breadth and depth of the 21st century experience, with Pibrac (b. 1983) for Hakanai Sonzai (2020), a series of theover 5,392 entries from 2,215 photographers in 60 differ- atrically stark portraits taken in Japan that draws upon on ent countries. The exhibition traverses wide-ranging themes, the subject of pain. Pibrac purposely forbade movement in taking a look at unheard voices, adversity, the pandemic and the images to create a feeling that the subjects are being the notion of morality, amongst others. Each selected work is “trapped by their surroundings with no visible escape.” Lastly, the third prize was given to Katya Ilina (b. 1990) steeped in its sincerity and wondrous storytelling. As in previous years, there are three cash prizes for the for David (2021), from the series Rosemary & Thyme. Shot winners. David Prichard (b. 1966) took gold for images of against a garnet-red curtain, a male sitter locks eyes with the First Nation women who have spent most of their working viewer: composed, confident and sensual. The composition lives on cattle stations in North Queensland, Australia. On intentionally appropriates the body language of Titian’s Rethe series Tribute to Indigenous Stock Women (2021), Prichard naissance oil painting The Venus of Urbino (1538) – explorremarked: “I wanted to produce portraits that were dignified, ing the infinite fluidity and possibilites that gender presents.
Words Robyn Sian Cusworth
National Portrait Gallery, London Until 2 January npg.org.uk
6
Contacts PHYLLIS CHRISTOPHER
Naked torsos of heavily tattooed women, crowds of impassioned activists at AIDS protests: these are the striking images of Phyllis Christopher, which are, somewhat aptly, tucked away in a dimly lit room on the second floor of Newcastle’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, BALTIC, Gateshead. Much like San Francisco’s 1990s lesbian community that Christopher documents here, these archival images are hidden from plain sight. Once inside, however, visitors are greeted with a series of unabashedly celebratory photographs. Castro Street Fair (1989), for example, sees a group of women set on top of telephone boxes, their legs dangling freely over the edge, smiles across all of their luminous faces. Contacts, curated by Laura Guy, coincides with Christopher’s solo exhibition at the Grand Union in Birmingham, representing the artist’s first major retrospectives. In an era heavily defined by the HIV / AIDS crisis and its representation in the media, Christopher’s images showcase a sense of
simultaneous playfulness across San Francisco. These handprinted pieces belong to the long-held politicised tradition of documentary photography, and capture the performance of queer identities and feminist action, both in and out of the public eye. They do, however, bring vivacity through a process that involves bleaching and toning the images, evoking the independent aesthetics of DIY art, punk and zines. These images go beyond a mere celebration of lesbianism, however, and resist the idea of queerness being inextricable from radical politics. Christopher and her collaborators achieve an insightful exploration of the relationship between the street, stage and studio, and their respective functions as queer spaces, places both personal and communal. Ultimately, Christopher’s work is an invitation for visitors to question the nature and complexity of lesbian identity – what it means and how it is constantly evolving – whilst offering insightful provocations about female censorship.
Words Katie Tobin
BALTIC, Gateshead Until 20 March baltic.art
Aesthetica 127
128 Aesthetica
film reviews
1
The Hand of God PAOLO SORRENTINO
Paolo Sorrentino's The Hand of God is sublime autofiction, beautifully carving its narrative from the memories of Naples' youth. The title refers to footballer Diego Maradona’s (1960-2020) infamous handball goal against England in the 1986 World Cup, although the film begins some two years earlier, when the controversial Argentinean joined Napoli, transforming the city. The film’s protagonist is Fabietto (Filippo Scotti), a curly-haired, cherubic-looking teen who becomes ecstatic when he hears that Maradona is coming to play for the club he’s supported since he was a young boy. He lives with his parents, Saveiro (Sorrentino regular Toni Servillo) and Maria (Teresa Saponangelo), and older brother Marchino (Marlon Joubert). There's also a sister, never seen because she’s always occupying the bathroom. Sorrentino paints these family scenes full of life and warmth.
Sorrentino’s admiration for Italian maestro Federico Fellini is no secret, as the Oscar-winning The Great Beauty showed. Fellini turns up in a scene where Marchino attends an audition (the filmmaker behind La Dolce Vita was known for visiting Naples to find unusual faces). Although a lookalike Maradona appears, The Hand of God is not a football movie, and indeed, the joy of the footballer’s arrival is soon tempered in Fabietto’s life. Sorrentino draws from tragedy that struck his own upbringing, spinning the film towards a more melancholic and reflective second half. His relationship with the muse-like aunt Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri) is particularly touching, another journey from innocence to experience. What results is a beguiling exploration of sexuality, creativity and ambition – filled with the joy and pain that life can bring. It is another masterstroke from Sorrentino.
Words James Mottram
netflix.com
2
Hope MARIA SØDAHL
On Christmas Eve, Anja (Andrea Bræin Hovig) is informed she has a brain tumour, and possibly only three months to live. Fuelled by this devastating news, and strong steroid medication, Anja throws herself into preparing for the worst whilst attempting to put on a brave face for her family, who have gathered for Christmas week celebrations. Director Maria Sødahl draws on her own experience of battling a terminal cancer diagnosis in this deeply moving drama. Because of this, the film takes on a documentarian quality, following Anja to endless hospital appointments and test results that spell doom. But Sødahl recognises that sadness isn’t necessarily the dominant state of mind during a crisis such as this. Anja is constantly caught off-guard by her own emotions, becoming overwhelmed by the ups and downs of everyday interactions. Anything from cruel offhand re-
marks from her young children to being congratulated on an achievement at work, sends her fleeing from the room, desperate not to let slip that something is wrong. Hovig tackles Anja’s fluctuating mental state with reserve – her actions are frantic, and reactions heartbreaking to witness – but she never strays into melodramatic territory. Stellan Skarsgård provides a grounding presence as Thomas, Anja’s on-and-off-again partner. It’s easy to believe that this couple have a long and complicated history. Snippets of their past re-surface, disrupting Anja’s hasty plans, forcing the couple to assess the relationship neither of them prioritised before. However, for every scene filled with despair, another plants that small seed of optimism that Anja and her family need to survive. It’s this balance that makes Hope such a devastating, yet ultimately warm, human story.
Words Stephanie Watts
picturehouses.com
3
Natural Light DÉNES NAGY
Dénes Nagy’s prize-winning war drama is a visually astute, if isolating feat, adaped with unflinching authority from Pál Závada’s novel Természetes fény. Set in the dark, sprawling Ukrainian forests during WWII, the film is tethered to the viewpoint of a Hungarian soldier, Corporal István Semetka (Ferenc Szabó), on patrol with his unit. Within the looming trunks, the light barely distinguishable between dawn and dusk, the visibly tired yet upstanding István maintains his solemn duties and lives to a strict moral code right until a horrific yet pointedly unseen conclusion. Nagy conjures and sustains stoicism in his lead actor, who, like the surrounding cast, is nonprofessional. Dialogue is minimal, with the filmmaker instead choosing to play off the slow dread invoked by an ongoing conflict that ravages the entirety of the forest. Cinematographer Tamás Dobos uses a bleak, muted
palette to amplify the film’s realism, and there are echoes of Andrei Tarkovsky and Elem Klimov’s deeply affecting war horror Come And See in both the film's composition and themes. Yet unlike Klimov, Nagy keeps the violence present, but on the periphery. He, instead, gravitates towards the moral dilemmas of war – being a filmmaker whose background lies in documentary. István is portrayed as a lesser-evil, who nonetheless feels chained to his sense of duty in spite of the evolving terror. The decision to downplay the war crime – which takes place between István’s unit and the civilians of a small village – may have been a bid to emphasise the chilling and systematic nature of violence at the hands of imposing forces. Instead, it translates as a somewhat guarded and cautious move. As a result, this stunningly orchestrated small-scale study of war feels unshakably hollow.
Words Beth Webb
curzon.com
Aesthetica 129
130 Aesthetica
music reviews
1
New Flesh LOVE OBJECT
Love Object is the intriguing new electro pop / darkwave project of elusive Moscow duo Dasha Utochka and Danya Muu. Both have previously toured the world as DJs – Utochka as DJ Aktu and Muu as Mucity – whilst Utochka is a co-founder of the erotic magazine Areola. At times other-worldly, Love Object fuses electronic body music (EBM) with electroclash and disco. There are numerous references to punk and industrial, each song injected with a richly layered and combative energy. Track by track, the album offers a fascinating journey. Opener Love Kill is a brooding mid-tempo excursion with pulsing synths and electronic bass reminiscent of 1980s Madonna and Pet Shop Boys melding buoyant pop with some of the darkness of prime Depeche Mode. Robot gives more than a nod to Kraftwerk, both in the title and the vocoder-effect vocals, and draws to a close with elec-
tronic effects that bring to mind early Human League. Abyss, meanwhile, bears all the hallmarks of an energetic and minimal 1990s dance track with only the starkly cold vocals keeping it from straying too far into commercial chart territory. Taking a somewhat darker turn, Virus bears the same icy vocal delivery against a stark electronic backdrop that sounds like a long-lost Gary Numan single. On the vibrant Transparent Woman, the tempo is raised, offset with an incessant vocal melody that locks itself into your brain and refuses to leave. Although there are clearly numerous influences across the breadth of the album, it never falls into the trap of electro-by-numbers, nor does it ever sound truly retro. The on-point production, combined with icy and robotic vocal delivery, offers the right amount of individuality and modernity that will make this album stand out.
Words Matt Swain
italiansdoitbetter.com
2
Kids Against the Machine NOGA EREZ
Early in 2021, Israeli singer Noga Erez released the electronic pop, bass-heavy, original incarnation of her much applauded second album KIDS. Months later comes this re-imagining of the very same songs, backed with entirely live and completely revived production values. On the surface, it’s festival friendly, leaning heavily on the seriously talented brass section to punctuate each of the songs. However, this is a glorious and consistent component to an already joyous project, which surprisingly surpasses its predecessor, enchanting a raw passion behind the words. Whilst lyrically not always the most complex or boundary pushing, the flows, fervent delivery and vibe are immaculate. Every take of lead and backing vocal is exactly where it should be, and the symbiosis between Erez and the musicians is second to none, which is no mean feat given that this is essentially a pro-
ject of remixes, a phrase which does not quite do it justice. The live music production almost feels 2001-era Dr Dre – in its clean head-nod rigidity, especially on VIEWS, featuring ROUSSO, which is a pounding march. The extremely beautiful You So Done sees Erez sweetly singing over heart-wrenching, reverbed guitar, really close to the mic in the style of Karen O. Candyman is a layered masterpiece, children singing in the background with Erez taking the lead, intimately whispering, hitting you in the gut like the first time hearing Don’t Speak by No Doubt. The album’s closer Switch Me Off teeters into wavy, jazz club at midnight territory with background white noise, mysterious electric piano chords and smoky duet vocals. Ultimately, this is a fantastic, pivoted look at an already great album, bringing new angles to songs that fans would have only have just gotten their head around.
Words Kyle Bryony
nogaerez.com
3
Covers CAT POWER
There is something new in Cat Power's sound that feels shall's own Hate from LP The Greatest (2006). She sang like the dawn of a new era: of fortitude and drive. The “I hate myself and I want to die,” Now, Unhate looks back source of which are not just strong vocals, but drums that, on that previously raw devastation in the rear view mirror. The Pogue's A Pair of Brown Eyes has kept its Irish folk unlike in previous songs, lead with a reduced, serene confidence on eye level with the vocals. Covers is Chan song rhythm, but Marshall has created an eerie atmosMarshall's (aka Cat Power's) third album with reinter- phere with otherworldly sounding synth organs. On Nick pretations, after The Covers Record (2000) and Jukebox Cave's I Had a Dream, Joe, a dark reverberating piano (2008). It showcases an eclectic selection of 12 self-pro- meets punk rhythms, and the album closes with Billie duced tracks by Dead Man's Bones, Nico, Iggy Pop, The Holiday's I'll be Seeing You. Now: a grungy lullaby. The title, Covers, is a hilarious understatement of MarReplacements, Lana Del Rey, Bob Seger and Kitty Wells. The album kicks off with a powerful rendition of Frank shall's ability to turn existing compositions into entirely Ocean's Bad Religion. A guitar soars, the drums push- new ones – into her very own compositions, essentially. ing the song forward, constantly wanting to speed up Seemingly carefree, she does not worry too much about the tempo and thus tricking us into anticipating a grand the original melodies and words. Freedom is weaved into sonic take off. It does not happen; we are trapped in Power's sound, which, combined with melancholic and beautiful suspense. Unhate is an updated version of Mar- intimate vocals, makes this record her best work to date.
Words Marthe Lisson
catpowermusic.com
Aesthetica 131
132 Aesthetica
book reviews
1
Digital Suffragists MARIE TESSIER
Marie Tessier has been moderating comments at the of male white supremacy” – as far back as The Iliad. “The fossils of historic gender segregation and the ofNew York Times since 2007, the year the first iPhone went on the market. Today, the number of smartphone users ficial exclusion of women from the public square have is estimated at over six billion. With so many people functioned as the new bones of digital technology and connected to the internet, the public sphere should, in the public conversations they support,” Tessier argues. “It theory, be more democratic than ever. So why is there has been digitally reframed and cast out into the world an absence of women’s voices online? Why are they out- as if it were something new. But it is very, very old.” Digital Suffragists outlines the manifold reasons why numbered by men? What does this mean for democracy? “The fact is,” Tessier states, “that women are routinely many women’s voices continue to go unheard – presentcriticised, demeaned, threatened, interrupted and char- ing in-depth analyses of news comments and online acterised as wrong, unruly, disgusting and out of place trolling. It also takes a deep dive into implicit gender bias when they exercise their rights as citizens or do their in technology and web design. Finally, the text paves a jobs as elected officials.” One such example is US repre- way forward, imagining a democratic media space where sentative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was confronted gender and racial representation are at the forefront. in this way on the Capitol steps in 2020. Tessier traces “It’s not enough to simply call on women to speak up,” these patterns of behaviour – what she calls “the fossils Tessier says. “It is fundamentally a design problem.”
Words Eleanor Sutherland
MIT Press mitpress.mit.edu
2
Black Paper TEJU COLE
Photographer and writer Teju Cole (b. 1976) draws a was. I seek him out for a certain kind of otherwise unbearseries of lucid connections on the connotations of colour, able knowledge.” Cole is too subtle a narrator to spell shadow and gradient. Here, we are transported from the out what this knowledge might be, but we suspect that world of photography and abstract art – via theories of an overly “black-and-white” worldview is being held to racial difference and the social hierarchies they uphold account for many of the evils in our present moment: not – to the domain of morality, in which “light” and “dark” least the appalling treatment of migrants, whose deaths signify good and evil. Above all, this text explores the en route to western cities are amongst those referenced conceptual and metaphorical dimensions of “blackness.” here. For Caravaggio, by contrast, truth lies in shading. The main body of the collection comes from a set of The book hinges on an introductory portrait of Caravaggio (1571-1961), Renaissance master of chiaroscuro essays, which have been expanded from lectures deliv(the use of shading to suggest the substance and volume ered in 2019. Here, Cole asserts that we should make of objects) and violent paranoiac, whose biography is more expansive and subtle use of all our senses in saturated with tales of depravation and excess. “He was a taking in the world. Indeed, read as a whole, these stories murderer, a slaveholder, a terror and a pest,” Cole notes. “collectively argue for using our senses – interpreted as “But I don’t go to Caravaggio to be reminded of how good capaciously as possible – to respond to experience, empeople are, and certainly not because of how good he brace epiphany, and intensify our ethical commitments.”
Words Greg Thomas
The University of Chicago Press press.uchicago.edu
3
The New Urban Aesthetic MONICA MONTSERRAT DEGEN & GILLIAN ROSE
The past 15 years have seen a huge amount of work on infrastructure. Fast forward to 2022 and the overwhelming presence of advanced digital technology provides a fascinating point of departure to examine design and development as a whole, both in the present and in future. This new title exemplifies how the colonisation of data is defining the early 21st century urban experience, as a radical reconfiguration of 20th century inhabitation. For Gillian Rose, Head of the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, and coauthor, Mónica Montserrat Degen, Reader in Cultural Sociology at Brunel University London, the dynamics of the contemporary world are fundamentally shifting as digital data is extracted, processed and returned in different formats, devices and situations. And, these changes are happening most intensely in cities. Today, a bewildering
amount of sensors generate data, which is gathered and analysed by human as well as algorithmic agents, and is used for things as diverse as the allocation of housing to policing and healthcare. Whilst the average citizen is aware of how smartphones, cameras and apps influence their everyday experiences, from travel to socialising, the deeper entanglements and interactions are less obvious. The authors focus on three key examples of change in three very different cities: a large redevelopment in Doha, Qatar; the renovation of Milton Keynes to become a smart city; and the cultural regeneration of London's Smithfield Market into the Culture Mile. They examine how social media, and other technologies like CGI, have been critical factors in civic participation and gentrification. The conclusion leads, as promised, to the definition of a new aesthetic: glamorous, flowing and dramatic.
Words Christopher Kanal
Bloomsbury bloomsbury.com
Aesthetica 133
134 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 135
136 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 137
138 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 139
artists’ directory
ERIC WILES
THOMAS WITZKE
California-based Eric Wiles’ fine art and landscape photography reveals dynamic images of natural beauty. His goal is to bring awareness to the variety of wondrous places in the world, in the hope that we will be inspired to contribute to global conservation and protection efforts. He notes: “In showing the magnificence of our home, we can recognise that every day is Earth day.” Wiles’ work has been propelled to international awards, exhibitions and fairs including the Musée du Louvre and Red Dot Miami.
Thomas Witzke is a painter, photographer and digital artist based in Stuttgart and Ulm. He focuses on the narrative aspect of colour; this is perhaps best expressed in the L’art pour L’art series, in which the viewer is invited to explore rooms in museums and artists’ studios. The depicted spaces are in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Museum Berggruen, Berlin and the Neue Pinakothek, Munich, and the studios of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Lyonel Feininger and Gabriele Münter. This award-winning series has been shown in numerous exhibitions.
ew-photo.com I eric-wiles.pixels.com I @eric.wiles.photo
kunstmedia.com | Instagram: @thomaswitzke9
DEBORAH MOSS Deborah Moss is an award-winning artist who works from her studio, which is nestled in a native forest in North Auckland, New Zealand. Drawing upon the power and dynamism of nature, she translates the local environment to her artworks, creating poetic expressions, energetic gestures and colourful stories that reveal a powerful alchemy of forces between the natural world and her interior vision. Painting is experimental and process-driven for Moss; she encourages each composition to develop on its own accord through rich layers of paint and response to surface discoveries. Once each original artwork is sold, a native-species tree such as the puriri is planted on her rural property as part of her Planting Hope conservation initiative.
"I believe small everyday decisions can make a difference to our environment and that every individual can too. I am passionate about working in an environmentally responsible way." Moss holds an MA (Hons) from the University of Auckland. She exhibits work regularly throughout New Zealand and Australia and her works are held in numerous international private collections.
deborahmossart.com I Instagram: @deborahmoss_art
140 Aesthetica
Alisa Burachuk
Charly Meyer
Alisa Burachuk is a Siberia-born, Netherlands-based fine artist. Her expanding practice is gradually moving from landscapes and still lifes to abstract compositions. She works with oil, mixed media and digital art to capture the brightest moments of her personal experiences. Nature is a primary inspiration, helping to bring colour and dynamism to each work. alisaburachuk.com I Instagram: @alisaburachuk
Netherlands-based Charly Meyer sees the evolution of photography as a source of endless possibilities. The artworks in the Forest, Fields and Sea series are created using a photograph as a starting point. The images are then converted into patterns that are transformed into three-dimensional objects inspired by light, forms and colours found in the natural world. charlymeyer.com
Cher Pruys
ke sun
Cher Pruys is a painter specialising in capturing the everyday through hyperrealism. Still lifes, landscapes, flora and fauna, machines and portraiture all form part of the artist's practice; each piece is skilfully created with emotion and great attention to detail. Pruys believes that a well-executed painting can influence a viewer’s feelings in the same way music influences one’s emotions. artbycher.ca I Instagram: @cherpruys
Ke Sun is a Chinese artist and designer whose practice includes traditional and digital paintings, as well as 3D animation and video installations. She draws upon personal, collective and cultural memory to create a visual language. The detailed works explore themes of nostalgia and the search for spiritual and cultural renewal amid contradictions of modernity – specifically, the Covid-19 pandemic reality. kesunn.com I IG: @_sun_ke
Kristine Narvida
Leili Khabiri
Berlin-based Latvian artist Kristine Narvida works with oil on linen, using models as her subjects. Conceptually, her paintings explore the acceleration of time and humankind’s place within the present moment. She notes: “Every line and brushstroke is precise, just as every meeting with this person is a thought that crosses my mind. A work with thought allows me to encode how the ideal becomes material." narvida.com
Leili Khabiri is a British-Iranian artist who works predominantly with textiles and sculpture. Her practice is centred around process – shifting the manner of approaching a piece to one that is more ritualistic. Tactility and time spent with the piece in its creation is of key importance. Some of Khabiri's methods include weaving and embroidering by hand, as well as foraging for precious materials for use in sculptures. leilikhabiri.com
For submission enquiries regarding the Artists’ Directory, contact Katherine Smira on directory@aestheticamagazine.com
Aesthetica 141
artists’ directory
Margaret Juul
Raine Storey
Florida-based multidisciplinary artist Margaret Juul’s compositions invoke the colours, reflections and vibrance of water in motion, expressing the fluidity and volatility of the natural world. For over two decades, she has created paintings and illustrations, as well as interior and textile designs for celebrity homes, and corporate and hospitality collections. margaretjuulpaintings.com
Canada-born Raine Storey is an emerging artist based in London who specialises in large-scale works. Her latest oil painting When it Rains demonstrates a distinctive style – combining realism with abstraction, emanating a vibrant atmosphere and spirit of humanity, whilst expressing a calmness in palette. Storey notes: "I want to blur boundaries between classical and contemporary styles." rainestorey.com I IG: @artbyrainestorey
sam taylor
Soushi Tanaka
Sam Taylor is a UK-based digital photographer. He has Cerebral Palsy and is a full-time wheelchair user; dexterity is a challenge, although advances in digital technology help him to further his art practice. Taylor combines traditional photography with new post-production techniques to create unique, highly-detailed compositions of local landscapes. taylor-prints.org.uk I Instagram: @taylor.designs.s
Soushi Tanaka is a Tokyo-based photographer. His work uses an optical mechanism to compress and transform global news information onto a flat surface. Each unique image features the corresponding date, month and year data and is posted online. Although it is not possible to read specific news on the abstracted images, the motifs and relevant dates can "shake the viewer's memory." tanakasoushi.net I IG: @soushi_tanaka
Stéphanie Poppe
Yeonseo Hong
Stéphanie Poppe is based between Belgium and France; she is a paper and embroidery artist influenced by her family’s background in the textile industry. Her style, sitting between abstract impressionism and baroque minimalism, has been informed by an ode to patience and the concept of “mono no aware” – a sensitivity to ephemera, and a wider awareness of transience and impermanence. stephaniepoppe.com
For Seoul-based artist Yeonseo Hong, home stands at the intersection of light, water, place and time, where there is no need for the notions of "inside" and "outside." As such, she believes that we instinctively look for a primal feeling of home. Hong paints simple, universal shapes inspired by her grandmother’s patchwork quilts to explore and express personal emotions of home. yourjuliana.com
142 Aesthetica
Abigail Flanders
Alegia Papageorgiou
Abigail Flanders is an emerging UK-based oil and acrylic painter who launched her creative practice during a Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. She creates a quality of realism by combining techniques from the old masters with contemporary views of 21st century landscapes, seascapes and portraiture. Texture and light are used to enhance vibrancy and a feeling of movement. Instagram: @aflanders_art
Alegia Papageorgiou is an Athensbased multidisciplinary artist. Her work focuses on the images that surround us – specifically their impact on our conceptions of reality and sense of identity. She challenges not only what we see, but also what we perceive as real, thus hoping to bring forth a redefinition of those images and of the ideas they imply. alegiapapageorgiou.com Instagram: @alegia_p
Alma Muminovic
Carcazan
For Denver-based Alma Muminovic, photography is a form of therapy – it allows her to be in a location and observe its calm, lonely beauty. She uses a refurbished Polaroid SX-70 with manual features to achieve a mix of rich and faded colours and contrasting lighting – bringing forth the mood of a place. Memories and the perceived quickening of time as we age also play a role in the creative process. Instagram: @praecordiasghost
Illustrator and animator Carcazan offers new visual commentaries on themes of the othering, borders and human rights issues. Her debut stop-motion film Write To Protest considers UK artists' rights; she has worked with social justice groups to provide content for campaigns. UK-based Carcazan is organising the launch of an illustration festival, illoFEST, to debut in 2022. carcazan.com I IG: @Carcazan illo-fest.com
Cecilia Sjölund
Clare Newton
Cecilia Sjölund is a Swedish painter based in Stockholm. Traditional oil techniques are combined with a contemporary perspective; the compositions tell insightful stories about small, intimate, everyday moments. Sjölund's work has been accepted for numerous art fairs, including the London Art Biennale 2021 and Portrait Now! 2021, The Carlsberg Foundation's Portrait Award for Nordic artists. csjolund.com
Clare Newton is a conceptual artist, photographer and curator. Deeply inspired by nature and conservation, her reflective and experiential works are created to help "reconnect us with the rhythms of life and quieten human emotions such as fear and anxiety." Newton is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and has displayed work in numerous solo exhibitions across the UK. Artnewton.co.uk
Cristiane Chaves
gal Shahar
Brazil-born Cristiane Chaves uses the loom to weave narratives. Based between London and Lisbon, she upcycles various waste materials, interlacing lived experiences from the community and her immersion within it. For Parkside Estate, Chaves manipulated domestic waste; the resulting collages and projections transcend the physical and forge disruptive possibilities through an unembodied digital platform. Instagram: @cristianechaves_textiles
Digital and analogue photographer Gal Shahar is based in Tel Aviv. She uses the camera lens as an outlet of the subconscious; as such, her images are the product of the questioning of personal experiences throughout life. She notes: “We can find our inner selves, in every step, every move and every act in our daily lives." Although the work is personal, Shahar aims to create an engaging story for the viewer. galshahar.com I IG: @galishahar
For submission enquiries regarding the Artists’ Directory, contact Katherine Smira on directory@aestheticamagazine.com
Aesthetica 143
artists’ directory
Iana Tovalovich
Iryna Sych
Iana Tovalovich uses the beauty of nature as a key inspiration for her paintings of landscapes, still lifes and abstracts. Tempera helps to convey a smooth flow of tones and oil is used to bring forth the bright and sometimes lush palette of the natural world. The works are imbued with life's broad spectrum of emotions – from the everyday to the profound. Tovalovich has exhibited work throughout Europe. Instagram: @art_miller_tovalovich
Iryna Sych was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine. When she was 17, she moved to the culturally rich city of Prague, where her passion for art evolved. Sych's compositions are abstract and she explores the use of diverse materials such as oil, acrylic, gold and silver imitations, epoxy, crystals and inks. Each painting represents freedom whilst the colours offer a message of hope and aspiration. Instagram: @artabstracto
Junpei Murakami
Kunal Kohli
Japan-based artist Junpei Murakami expresses the dynamism, vitality and variety of living things. His unique and intricate form of art is created by arranging folded silk cloths. Traditional handicraft techniques are combined with a contemporary viewpoint to convey the diversity of nature. Murakami is particularly interested in achieving delicate beauty and harmony. Instagram: @mitizure_tsumami Twitter: @_mitizure_
Kunal Kohli is an award-winning photographer based in New York. For the series Absolution he notes: "It is about our strength to move on from our past and what we don’t know about our future. When we accept and surrender to what is now, only then we can reach our absolution. I also want to emphasise the emotions we go through before reaching our absolution." kunalkohli.com IG: @kunal_kohli_photography
La Chigi
Practically Creative
La Chigi is an Italian visual artist based in Trento. She utilises unconventional materials and objets trouvés to explore themes of the “house” as a physical space and a place of the soul, as well as the relationships between its inhabitants. In the resulting three-dimensional installations, La Chigi distills their complex feelings into small, ironic and lighthearted skits. lachigi.it Instagram: @la.chigi.art
Laura Robertson and Jared Holden are an artist and engineer duo known as Practically Creative. Their more recent interdisciplinary works combine the art of surrealism, analogue collage and generative AI technology. The duo are lauded for their experimental and deliberate approach, as well as diverse use of unique materials. practicallycreative.co.uk Instagram: @practicallytv
Richard Wohlfarth
Rieko Whitfield
Richard Wohlfarth graduated from the Neue Schule für Fotografie in Berlin, where he became interested in perceptual psychological phenomena. In his work he questions fundamental relationships of nature and time, displaying complex and elaborate visual worlds in black and white. Wohlfarth will exhibit images at Rotterdam Photo, 10-13 February. richardwohlfarth.com Instagram: @richardwohlfarth
Japanese-American Rieko Whitfield weaves immersive worlds with speculative mythologies through performance, moving image, installation, sculpture, painting, music and text. Her non-linear storytelling decentres narratives of western capitalist individualism to move towards beyond-human collectivism. Whitfield is the founder of London-based performance art platform Diasporas Now. riekowhitfield.com IG: @riekowhitfield
144 Aesthetica
The Destination for Art and Culture
Subscribe & Save 40% 12 months from £24.95 + p&p. Available in both print and digital formats.
www.aestheticamagazine.com/subscribe Aesthetica 145
Gillian Wearing, Me: Me, 1991. Gelatin silver bromide print, mounted on aluminum, 20 3/16 x 17 1/16 in. (51.3 x 43.4 cm). © Gillian Wearing.
last words
Jennifer Blessing & Nat Trotman Curators, Guggenheim Museum, New York
146 Aesthetica
“In the video piece Wearing, Gillian (2018) the artist states: ‘ We all wear masks. We’re all actors. When you leave your front door in the morning, you’re putting on a performance for the world.’ The pandemic has only intensified this realisation, not just because of the physical masks so many of us wear in public, but also because of the screens we use to communicate with each other in private. By looking carefully at how these everyday performances impact people both psychologically and emotionally, Wearing offers a space for empathy and compassion, whilst asking us to examine the ways in which authenticity can be constructed through screen-based interfaces.” Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks occupies all four of Guggenheim’s Tower galleries, spanning a 30-year career. The exhibition runs until 4 April. guggenheim.org.
Aesthetica 147
148 Aesthetica
