THE PLACE OF THE MIND

Roger Ballen » RETROSPECTIVE

... until 31 May 2021

Luo Yang » YOUTH, GIRLS

... until 28 March 2021

Aneta Grzeszykowska » FAMILY SKIN

... until 5 April 2021

Francisco Carolinum Linz

Museumstr. 14, A-4010 Linz
T +43 (0)732-7720 522 00
www.ooelkg.at
Tue-Sun 10am-6pm

Roger Ballen: Cat Catcher, 1998 © Roger Ballen

THE PLACE OF THE MIND

Roger Ballen » RETROSPECTIVE

... until 31 May 2021

Roger Ballen’s errily beautiful photographs are populated by outsiders, animals, and enigmatic objects. With his photographic stagings, which create a strange and perplexing atmosphere, Roger Ballen dives into the abysmal depths of the human psyche. Born in New York in 1950, Roger Ballen is one of the most important and influential international art photographers of today. For more than 40 years, he has been living and working in Johannesburg, South Africa. With his both fascinating and unsettling work, he occupies a unique position in contemporary photography, situated somewhere between documentation and fiction.

At the Francisco Carolinum, the OÖLKG presents the first comprehensive museum solo exhibition of the renowned photographic artist in Austria. The show features works from all of the artist's important series and creative periods: from his early work in the late 1960s which was influenced by photojournalism, to his multi-faceted film oeuvre to current colour photographs. In addition to his photographs, the museum will be showing many of his well known films including his very most recent production Roger the Rat.

Roger Ballen: Smoked Out, 2020 © Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen became internationally known with disconcerting photo-documentary works showing underprivileged whites and their precarious living conditions during apartheid. With his unsparing eye for the banal and grotesque, Roger Ballen portrayed the inhabitants and architecture of barren rural communities in South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s without any socially critical or voyeuristic attitude. While he continued to place outsiders and those on the fringe of society at the centre of his pictures, staging and psychologizing became more and more important in later series of Roger Ballen’s work. In formally aesthetic, captivating compositions, he deals with themes such as loss of control, chaos, madness, alienation, the relationship of humans with the animal world, the cruelty of life and death, and - time and again - the experience of otherness.

Roger Ballen himself describes his works as existential psychodramas that touch the subconscious and reveal the essence of the human condition. His haunting, radical photographs, which will be remembered for a long time, become a voyage of discovery into one's own psyche. Roger Ballen's work is complex and ambiguous, of universal expressiveness and archetypal character, but also full of irony, wit, and profound humour.

Luo Yang, Karman, GIRLS, 2017 © Luo Yang

Luo Yang » YOUTH, GIRLS

... until 28 March 2021

The Chinese photographer Luo Yang (born 1984) is one of the most internationally recognised artists* of her generation. After completing her studies in graphic design at the renowned Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang, she turned to photography. Numerous exhibitions in China in recent years, and latterly more frequently in Europe also, are proof of the international interest in her work. The presentation at FC-Francisco Carolinum of works from the series GIRLS and YOUTH is Luo Yang's first solo exhibition in Austria.

“I do think that every girl has her own beauty. It is also what I intend to present in my works. Girls who are real, confident and stay true to themselves are beautiful to me.”
Luo Yang

Luo Yang, Princess butterfly, YOUTH, 2019 © Luo Yang

In the series GIRLS, a long-term project she started in 2007, Luo Yang portrays Chinese women of her generation. While still a student, she began taking photographs of young women from her immediate environment, friends and acquaintances, and eventually expanded the circle to include women she met and became interested in through social media. This resulted in a kaleidoscope of a generation of women who, between traditional role models and rapid economic change in modern China, are searching for an individual lifestyle - away from conformism and social normalisation.

“The 1990s and 2000s generations are facing so many possibilities that previous generations didn’t have. They are generally more self-centered and bold, trying to strike the balance between traditions and international cultures.”
Luo Yang

Freedom and the desire for self-expression and individuality also characterise the YOUTH series. After a very personal approach to the women of her generation, Luo Yang began in 2019 to photograph adolescents of Generation Z, i.e. those born in the late 1990s and around 2000. She portrays young people in China who reject stereotypes and consciously break with traditional expectations. Fluid gender classifications are as much a central theme as is the search for individual expression between creative staging and authentic body awareness. At the same time, the photographer draws a sensitive picture of urban Chinese youth in search of orientation and identity.

From a socio-political perspective, Luo Yang focuses on those generations that emerged from the Chinese one-child policy. After the end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, young women and adolescents grew up under Deng Xiaoping's reform policy, when China increasingly opened up to the West and the free market economy, resulting in a tremendous economic upswing but also enormous social upheaval. Luo Yang's photographs are an artistic document of the times: young urban women and adolescents in 21st century China, in search of individuality, self-determination and independence.

Aneta Grzeszykowska: Selfie #19, 2014
Pigment ink on paper, 27 x 36 cm
© Courtesy of the artist and the Raster Gallery, Warsaw

Aneta Grzeszykowska » FAMILY SKIN

... until 5 April 2021

For more than 15 years, Polish artist Aneta Grzeszykowska (*1974) has been reflecting on fundamental questions of identity and self-understanding in her works. Her subject of focus is the human body, particularly that of women, in its role as a projection screen and construction. Family Skin addresses the wide range of methods, products, creams, gels, masks, massages and plastic surgery procedures for enhancing, perfecting and self-optimising the skin. The exhibition is set against the backdrop of this furious obsession with beauty and eternal youth.

By means of photography and sculpture, Aneta Grzeszykowska focuses on the construction of a physical aesthetic as an ideal image, also by opposing it with the signs of old age and disfiguration. She works with photographic and collage techniques, both digital and analogue.

These include, in particular, the rituals and mise-en-scène of beauty and self-expression that have become firmly established within social media as collective norms. Aneta Grzeszykowska deliberately experiments with these clichés in some of her series. Selfie (2014) and Face Book (2020) clearly allude to this with their titles. She provokes the question of what fragments of the self remain underneath the photographic surface, the shell and skin of the physical. To this end, she deploys her own body in performative transformations and stagings, which she documents in photo series, films and book objects. She takes on different roles. She works with clothing and masks, make-up, foundation and body paint.

Aneta Grzeszykowska, Mama #32, 2018
Pigment ink on paper, 50 x 36 cm
© Courtesy of the artist and the Raster Gallery, Warsaw

The exhibition is presenting selected works of various series dating from 2006 until the present. Examples will be shown of Untitled Film Stills (2006), which refers to the group of works of the same name by the American artist Cindy Sherman from the late 1970s. For Selfie (2014), individual body parts made of pig skin are reproduced, painted and made up. The artist plays with the narrative potential of photography, the pleasing horror and fascination of a narrative motif reminiscent of the novel character Viktor Frankenstein and his attempt to artificially create a human being, In Beauty Mask (2017), she stages herself in absurd, commercially available beauty masks. Face Book (2020) is in the tradition of extreme deformations and grimaces of the facial features, reminiscent of the heads of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736-1783).

With the series Mama (2018), she expanded the field of her investigations to include the relationship between mother and child and shifts familiar structures when the daughter plays with a replica, a doll, or her mother. This series also gives free rein to the assumptions and fears triggered by the photographs. The imagination creates the notion of a murder, a corpse and a truly horrific event.

Aneta Grzeszykowska lives and works in Warsaw. With "FAMILY SKIN", the Francisco Carolinum in Linz is presenting the first museum exhibition of her fascinating work outside Poland.

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© 11 Dec 2020 photo-index UG (haftungsbeschränkt)
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Editor: Claudia Stein & Michael Steinke
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