For our first exhibition of 2023, the Ravestijn Gallery is proud to present ‘The Constellation’ – a dizzying show of vibrant works by South African artist Nico Krijno (b. 1981). In a riot of colours and meandering forms, Krijno’s abstract works consider and apply photography’s many visual codes, symbols and patterns – as part of a bid to investigate the history of the image. The playful practice of performance defines Krijno’s process throughout, inviting a closer interrogation of modes of creation in and of themselves.
From staged photography to collage and video works, the densely-textured images that Krijno conceives are invariably hard to pin down. Synthetic, layered, digitally-manipulated, painterly, puzzling, enthralling; each one is unfixed and seemingly infinite, with a number focal points to absorb simultaneously. In the act of looking, the familiar traces – those things we recognise – are displaced and buried under elements we don’t. All the while, we rarely look away, succumbing instead to the works’ many mysteries.
Gregor Sailer (b. 1980 in Austria), known for his complex, long-term projects, spent the past five years focusing extensively on the Arctic. He took analogue photographs in Canada, Norway, Greenland, and Iceland, but also in Great Britain, working in temperatures as low as -55 °C. A large part of the photographs was even taken in restricted areas, to which he was finally granted access after months of organization and approval procedures, some of which lasted for years. Sailer’s new series of works, The Polar Silk Road, takes up climatic changes in the Arctic regions, how these are exploited economically, as well as the territorial aspirations of bordering countries.
First coined by China, the term Polar Silk Road alludes to the myth of the Silk Road. The opening of a new North Pole trade route would have massive economic advantages for any great power that succeeds in imposing its agenda there. Such geopolitical tensions dictate the expansion of military structures and research stations with a variety of different research focuses including climate change, the Aurora Borealis, or space climate. However, global warming is and remains the main driver behind all current North Pole developments: ice is retreating, borders, including those previously established by nature for mankind, are shifting, additional shipping routes such as the Polar Silk Road are emerging, and new sources of raw materials are becoming accessible.
As politically explosive as this topic may be, Sailer sees himself first and foremost as a photographer and artist who focuses on narrative and on image aesthetics and composition. The muted colors and pared-down nature of his images convey the ostensible calm of an icy world—one that a storm has brewi…
"MAGNUM OPUS" CONSISTS OF FIFTY SELECTED PHOTOGRAPHS REPRESENTING SEBASTIÃO SALGADO'S MAJOR WORKS OVER FIVE DECADES OF PHOTOGRAPHIC EXPEDITIONS AROUND THE WORLD.
This is the first time that an important selection of Sebastião Salgado’s work has been printed using platinum-palladium, which involves a sophisticated method of printing recognized for its singular beauty and which provides a unique sensation to the eye of the viewer.
Online life is both an extension of traditional social interactions and a radical departure from it. It is a place where we seek out stories, people, and knowledge – but it’s also a place that distorts and limits those interactions. Around the time of beginning this body of work, myself and my girlfriend were no longer living near each other. A natural thread within this project emerged visualising the feeling arising as we uphold relationships through a sterile looking-glass, distorting the sense for what is human and what is digital.
Developed as part of Photo Museum Ireland’s Early Career Artist Award, Cargo visualises the non-place that exists between people and online communication. A space where the subtleties of body language, touch and sound are lost or at the very least compressed. This ongoing body of work focuses on the unseen, playing with memory, imaginary data and visual documentation, exploring the spaces where online communication becomes the third party and mediator in the dialogue of a relationship.
Di sguincio is an exhibition of 22 prints by the Italian photographer Guido Guidi, his sixth solo exhibition at Large Glass. It coincides with the publication by MACK of the homonymous volume, the first of a trilogy entitled Album, which brings to fruition a series of over a hundred black-and-white photographs made by Guidi with small-format cameras between 1969 and 1981.
From the published series, the exhibition showcases selected photographs, mostly taken from 1977 to 1980 in Treviso and Preganziol, in Northern Italy, where Guidi taught at the time. This is a key juncture in Guidi’s work, as he continues his experimentation in black-and-white and increasingly in colour before moving to working predominantly in colour with a large format camera in the early 1980s.
'Di sguincio' is an Italian expression, often associated with looking, that can be translated as obliquely, aslant, asquint, and, by extension, diagonally, furtively, indirectly. This phrase poignantly conveys a key tenet of Guido Guidi’s aesthetics: a tangential gaze that seeks to dismantle received views, like the frontal view often associated to photography, and, by extension, to its purported verisimilitude or indexicality. Instead, Guidi’s photography favours an accidental gaze, aimed at uncovering unexpected slants to everyday objects, people or places, for which in the early 1980s he coined the term of 'qualsiasità', what-so-everness.
In this series, Guidi experiments quite playfully with chance or staged encounters with friends, family, objects, and also animals, seemingly without looking, or only through the corner of his eye as the series title suggests. Many of these photographs focus on details of objec…
Henri Le Secq: Sens. Palais synodal (Vue d’ensemble avec au premier plan le marché), cl. H. Le Secq. Coll. musée des Arts décoratifs. Don H. Le Secq des Tournelles, 1905
A new photography exhibition in the Sens Museums’ Orangerie, in partnership with the musée des Arts décoratifs (MAD, Paris), hallowed to the photographer Henri Le Secq (1818-1882).
From the earliest photograph produced in Burgundy in 1826, Sens attracted many photographers. Henri Le Secq, one of the greatest of his generation, perhaps at the invitation of Viollet-le-Duc, came to Sens in 1851, to take the first pictures of the monuments and the city. The MAD owns a part of his photographic collection given by his son in 1905. In collaboration with the Musées de Sens, it invites us to discover his work through original calotypes and cyanotypes.
These incredible centenary pictures, full of poetry and mystery, show the real experiment in tints with modern and unexpected frames.
VALIE EXPORT – The Photographs is the first exhibition to focus on the photographic oeuvre of the artist VALIE EXPORT (b. 1940), whose at times provocative performances and experimental installations have been a source of controversy. The show examines EXPORT’s use of photography as a critical exploration of processes of depiction and representation. At the interface of film, video art, drawing and body art the photographs offer a new perspective on her creative oeuvre.
VALIE EXPORT’s multimedia work eludes any simplistic categorisation or definition. As a pioneer of performance art, installation art and video art, EXPORT has consistently broken through the boundaries separating media genres, while using her own body as an artistic medium. Photography has always played a key role in her practice – be it for documentary or experimental purposes, as an element in multimedia installations or as art in its own right.
EXPORT has had a constant awareness of the importance of visually recording her performances. Back in 1968 two of her best-known performances, TAPP und TASTKINO and the action Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit, were attended by photographers (and filmmakers). For the performance TAPP und TASTKINO, a request was put out by megaphone asking spectators and passers-by to touch EXPORT’s breasts, which were covered by a box inspired by a cinema auditorium with a curtain that the artist wore like a garment. Participants had to maintain eye contact with EXPORT for a defined period of time while touching her, with the artist thereby reversing the voyeuristic male gaze, a typical feature of cinema. For Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit, EXPORT took artist Peter Weibel through the centre of Vienna o…
The practice of Italian Senegalese artist Adji Dieye (b. 1991), based in Zurich and Dakar, Senegal, is dedicated to the themes of postcolonialism and nation-building. From an Afro-diasporic perspective the artist examines how language and the urban landscape function in the writing of history, whose linearity becomes the focus of her critical enquiry. At the centre of Dieye’s exhibition is the video-based work Aphasia (2022), newly produced especially for Fotomuseum Winterthur during an artist residency of several months in Dakar. The work allows Afro-diasporic communities and Black identities to express themselves as living archives by giving them agency and a voice.
The loss of language is the conceptual starting point of the cross-disciplinary work Aphasia, which uses the interplay of photography, video and performance to unveil the contradictions of national knowledge production. The term "aphasia" (deriving from the ancient Greek word αφασία for speechlessness) describes a cognitive language disorder in which individuals are often unable to remember or communicate words. In Dieye’s work, however, the term is appropriated and transferred into a cultural context through a speech-based performance in different public spaces in Dakar. We see the artist sitting on a rooftop, a stack of pipes or a huge mound of building sand, with buildings and construction sites in the background mostly wrapped in fabric or covered in scaffolding. Absentmindedly, she leafs through a manuscript, mumbling sentences in broken French – excerpts of presidential speeches, written in French, that have been delivered to the public since Senegal’s independence in 1960 and which Dieye has arduously r…
