Aesthetica
THE ART & CULTURE MAGAZINE
www.aestheticamagazine.com
Issue 102 August / September 2021
HYBRID ARCHITECTURE
MODES OF FABRICATION
ACROSS THE NATION
Richard Mosse reveals ecological destruction through technicolour
Taking a closer look at the unique landscape of Santa Fe Modernism
The use of found photos prompts questions of truth and ownership
Jamie Hawkesworth explores the UK in a landmark project
UK £5.95 Europe €11.95 USA $15.49
MAPPING THE CLIMATE
Aesthetica 1
2 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 3
4 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 5
6 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 7
8 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 9
10 Aesthetica
Welcome Editor’s Note
On the Cover Thandiwe Muriu is a rising star. Her distinctive style is quickly gaining recognition across the globe, showcasing Kenya's unique visual heritage of cultures and vibrant colour palettes. The works are clean, crisp and elegant, demonstrating skill and vision. (p. 52)
Cover Image: Model: Mauryn Theo @maurynetheo. Makeup: Sinitta Akello @sinittaakello. Photographer: Thandiwe Muriu @thandiwe_muriu.
The pace at which technology continues to develop amazes me. I have recently come across digital fashion, for example. In its simplest terms, it basically means owning a “digital wardrobe” to dress your virtual self or avatar. It’s hard to believe that the idea of truly existing in an online format is at the cusp of becoming a reality. The metaverse is expanding everyday. It’s incredible how these virtual experiences, environments and assets developed so quickly during the online shift, as a result of the pandemic and its various lockdowns. I believe that these things are here to stay. But I like real life so much. Inside this issue we look at the critically acclaimed The British Isles by Jamie Hawkesworth, which offers a portrait of Britain from 2007 through to 2020. The photographs, shot across those 13 years, capture the beauty and diversity of the UK. The title is highly relevant as the continued struggle for equality resonates now more than ever. I predict that this publication will endure as a time capsule of early 21st century life. Meanwhile, we chat to Namsa Leuba about her vivid images that explore the distinction between “looking” and “seeing” in an in-depth interview about her dual heritage and artistic practice. We then survey Richard Mosse’s new large-scale project, Tristes Tropiques, which maps the environmental destruction unfolding across Brazil’s “arc of fire.” The series is an example of what cartographer Denis Wood has termed “counter-mapping” – a form of resistance mapmaking that exposes endangered landscapes, depicting the extent of human activities that threaten our climate and ecosystems. I am also thrilled to bring you 2021’s Next Generation of photographers in partnership with London College of Communication, as well as series from Benoit Paillé, Karen Navarro, Massimo Colonna, Gerwyn Davies and our cover photographer Thandiwe Muriu. Finally, the last words come from Centre national de l'audiovisuel's curator Daniela Del Fabbro on the ecological impact of agriculture. Cherie Federico
Aesthetica 11
34
66
98
110
92
60
24
46
12 Aesthetica
82
76
Contents 14 News This issue features a Shanghai retrospective of Zaha Hadid, and a major show at MoMA, which considers how architects reuse and repurpose.
20 10 to See Our list of summer exhibitions is diverse, with pivotal shows that cover everything from fashion photography to eye-opening documentaries.
24 Disparate Geographies Massimo Colonna invents spaces that play with our sense of reality. Ladders climb into the sky whilst ice creams melt into stark grey tarmac.
34 Playful Camouflage Gerwyn Davies creates handmade costumes that both empower and conceal. Glittering yellow ribbons and orange cones act as masquerade.
46 Hybrid Architecture Santa Fe Modern combines an arresting mix of the contemporary and traditional, from adobe influences to sleek 21st century minimalism.
52 A Fresh Perspective Thandiwe Muriu is a rising star. Her distinctive style is gaining recognition quickly across the globe, showcasing Kenya's unique visual heritage.
60 Mapping the Climate Richard Mosse's new project, Tristes Tropiques, turns the lens on environmental destruction, capturing invisible parts of the colour spectrum.
66 Shooting Hyperreality In Benoit Paillé’s methodology, banal objects take centre stage. Fences, poles and street lamps are ultra-magnified through vivid idiosyncrasy.
76 Cultural Iconography Vivid palettes and bold symbolism characterise Namsa Leuba's iconic photographs, which explore the distinctions between "looking" and "seeing."
82 Piecing it Together Karen Navarro’s laser-cut prints, cast in bubblegum pink and pillar box red, split models’ faces into concentric circles and checker board tiles.
92 Modes of Fabrication Artists have long sought inspiration within found photographs, dissecting and reassembling them. We look at the ethical implications of collage.
98 Complex Narratives We present 10 photographic talents who focus on aspects of privacy and intimacy, holding the viewer's gaze through moments of intervention.
110 Across the Nation Jamie Hawkesworth documents the British Isles in a landmark photography series that extends over numerous years, communities and topographies.
116 New and Noteworthy The 2021 graduates from Buckinghamshire New University engage with today's pressing issues, from ethical production to equal representation.
122 Gallery Reviews This edition's coverage includes two solo shows from Aesthetica Art Prize alumni, alongside key presentations at Serpentine and SFMOMA.
Reviews
Artists’ Directory
Last Words
127 Film, Music & Books The latest documentary from Mark Cousins features with genre-bending album releases and a comprehensive overview of women designers.
138 Featured Practitioners This issue's artists are using a variety of colours, textures, shapes and forms to present varied and complex perspectives on an ever-changing world.
146 Daniela Del Fabbro Centre national de l'audiovisuel's curator expands on a landmark exhibition and the wider social and ecological impact of contemporary agriculture.
Aesthetica Magazine is trademarked 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
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 Video Producer: Chris Maudsley
Artists’ Directory Enquiries: Katherine Smira directory@aestheticamagazine.com Subscriptions: subscriptions@aestheticamagazine.com General Enquiries: info@aestheticamagazine.com
Contributors: Diane Smyth Greg Thomas Rachel Segal Hamilton
Press Releases: pr@aestheticamagazine.com
Reviewers: Kyle Bryony, James Mottram, Stephanie Watts, Jack Solloway, Lily Pollock, Olivia Hampton, Matt Swain, Eleanor Sutherland, Shyama Laxman
Follow us: aestheticamagazine.com facebook.com/aestheticamagazine twitter.com/AestheticaMag pinterest.com/AestheticaMag instagram.com/AestheticaMag
Aesthetica 13
Vector Architects, Alila Yangshuo Hotel, Yangshuo, Guilin, Guangxi, China, 2013–2017. Photograph by Shengliang Su. Courtesy of MoMA.
news
A Resource Conscious Future REUSE, RENEW, RECYCLE China’s construction “boom” of the past few decades has This hybrid model not only anchors 21st century production “The practices repeatedly been framed as one reliant on imported architec- in a specific place and history; it also offers a perspective on represented in the tural expertise. Challenging this narrative is MoMA’s Reuse, how architecture can be part of both a global and a local exhibition challenge Renew, Recycle exhibition, organised by Martino Stierli, The conversation about the built environment. It marks a decisive traditional notions of Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, shift away from the mega projects of preceding generations.” sustainability, which and Evangelos Kotsioris, Curatorial Assistant, Department A pivotal example comes with Beijing-based office DnA_ have been often of Architecture and Design. The show focuses exclusively on Design and Architecture. Xu Tiantian, the firm’s principal, reduced to questions architectural works recently completed in China that were has been working extensively with the village communities of energy efficiency designed by those who are both China-born and based. of the rural Songyang County, located in China’s Zhejiang and building The practices represented in the exhibition challenge tra- Province, to produce a series of carefully considered archi- performance vis-a-vis ditional notions of sustainability, which have often been tectural interventions. Constructed primarily out of environ- the climate crisis.” reduced to questions of energy efficiency and building per- mentally friendly materials – including local bamboo, stone, formance vis-à-vis the climate crisis. Instead, this new genera- and timber – these placements build upon existing cultural tion of Chinese architects speaks to a multiplicity of method- and industrial traditions, and have already resulted in a sigologies, ranging from the adaptive reuse of former industrial nificant economic revitalisation of the region, thus working buildings, the recycling of materials and the reinterpretation against the depopulation of China’s rural hinterland. of ancient construction techniques, to the economic rejuveElsewhere, DnA’s highly acclaimed Bamboo Theatre nation of rural villages, combining the old and new. – made principally from bent and woven bamboo trees – Stierli and Kotsioris expand: “Whereas state-run institutes serves as a space for leisure for the residents of the Hengoverwhelmingly tend to rely on cookie-cutter designs that Keng village, and the Alila Yangshuo Hotel (pictured above), get repeated again and again, the projects of these smaller by Vector Architects, intelligently repurposes the industrial Reuse, Renew, Recycle independents are deeply rooted in the given cultural and en- facilities of an old sugar mill built during the 1960s next MoMA, New York vironmental context whilst at the same time being commit- to the Li River in Yangshuo, Guangxi. The exhibition serves 16 September - 4 July ted to a contemporary architectural language. It is precisely as a progressive blueprint towards a less extractive, more at this intersection where the most innovation is happening. resource-conscious future for architectural practice at large. moma.org
14 Aesthetica
From a New Perspective ZHA CLOSE UP
Guangzhou Opera House©Hufton+Crow.
Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid DBE RA (1950-2016) was Hadid’s legacy. Her movement as a student from Baghdad to “She was so ahead one of the world’s most pioneering architects – dubbed by Beirut and then to London; her footsteps as a woman through of her time – taking many as the “Queen of the Curves.” Both before and since a man’s world; and her legacy as a researcher journeying inspiration from her passing, she has been globally acknowledged for her through various geographies and histories, all contributed disparate elements in use of parametric forms and neo-futuristic designs – inspired to a sense of design at once in perpetual and suspended art history, technology by the Russian avant-garde. There’s hardly any need to motion. The result of these various moving curves, edges, and regional elaborate on Hadid’s influence, with the British-Iraqi architect lines and folds was the dissolution of subject and object – of geographies – that being such a household name. However, this summer, the person and building – which opened up a new space that there are so many different perspectives Modern Art Museum (MAM) Shanghai, considers a new Hadid boldly defined in her architecture.” One early example of this in (though never built) is the through which to perspective: focusing on Hadid’s formative works in China. Shai Baitel, Artistic Director, notes: “Hadid certainly was 1982 competition-winning design for the Peak Club, located view her portfolio.” widely revered. The remarkable thing about her work, how- in the hills above Hong Kong. This project took the topograever, is how timely it feels, even when viewed posthumous- phy of the city and explored the fluid relationships between ly. She was so ahead of her time – taking inspiration from building and site, interior and exterior, architecture and engidisparate elements in art history, technology and regional neering. Other projects include the Guangzhou Opera House geographies – that there are so many different perspectives (2010) and Beijing Daxing International Airport (2019), through which to view her portfolio. And it is precisely this which both generate an unrivalled spatial experience. In terms of how the works are being shown, MAM is offerinterdisciplinary approach that coincides with my own mandate. I seek out exhibitions that aren’t limited. Hadid’s work ing something new, mirroring Hadid’s sense of innovation, elegantly combines so many seemingly discordant features, having partnered with numerous computing experts and VR ZHA Close Up designers to visualise her seemingly impossible, improbable Modern Art Museum, so it coincides perfectly with our goals as a museum.” He continues: “Her Chinese projects, like the rest of her designs over the years. Many of these are on display for the Shanghai oeuvre, embraced the organic world through an interrogation first time, alongside never-before-seen models of the CECEP Until 29 August of movement. From a fraction of a second to an infinite Shanghai campus, the master plan for the Unicorn Island, gesture, movement – and its many turns and folds – defined and a model of the Xi’an International Football Centre. en.mamsh.org
Aesthetica 15
Malcolm X Speaks at a Rally in Harlem at 115th St. & Lennox Ave., New York, September 7, 1963. Adger Cowans (American, born 1936). Gelatin silver print. 16.2 × 23.5 cm (6 3/8 × 9 1/4 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles © Adger Cowans.
news
A Bird's Eye View IN FOCUS: PROTEST Over the past year, protests have grabbed our attention communicating messages through placards, banners and “Pictures of this kind worldwide. People have stood against institutionalised graffiti. Examples include John Simmons's (b. 1950) Fight emphasise the power racism, marched for women’s safety and continued to strike Like a Girl (2020), or Anthony Friedkin’s (b. 1949) piece from of shared voices in for the climate. In the UK, the controversial Police, Crime, 1993, which presents the outline of a human figure spray- creating social change. Sentencing and Courts Bill has brought public demon- painted on a wall, accompanied by the words: “These are the They also spark strations into sharper focus. Across newspapers, television thoughts that set fire to your city.” It’s an effective technique questions surrounding screens and social feeds, we are reminded frequently of the that resonates throughout history. In 1970, Robert Flora the future of power of protest images to propel action and inspire change. (1929-1986) preserved the moment as a Women’s Liberation documentary. In the But how are these events documented? Who is clicking the marcher was “temporarily overwhelmed” by an opposing age of social media group of protestors in Los Angeles. Their handwritten signs and viral footage, shutter? Can they change the world for the better? how do we safeguard During demonstrations, photographers often take to the collide, jostling to occupy space in front of the camera. What’s clear is that these are more than just negatives: they those in the frame?” streets to record fast-moving events. At other times, they bear witness to daily injustices, helping to make them more are reminders of the past and lessons for tomorrow. Pictures widely known. Getty Center's In Focus: Protest compiles such of this kind emphasise the power of shared voices in creating pictures, all made during periods of social struggle in the social change. They also spark questions surrounding the USA. Amongst the selection, which delves into pivotal events future of documentary. In the age of social media and viral from previous decades, are era-defining snapshots, such as footage, how do we safeguard those in the frame? Bruce Davidson’s March from Selma, Alabama (1965). Bear- “In Focus: Protest reminds us of the ability that photographs ing an urgent reminder to vote, 18-year-old protester Bobby have to both document and propel action,” says Mazie Harris, Simmons marches alongside other Civil Rights advocates Assistant Curator of Photographs. “We aim to give audiences from Selma to Montgomery. Also featured is work by Adger a place to think about some of the ways that photographers In Focus: Protest Cowans (b. 1936), whose bird's eye view captures Malcolm have brought attention to efforts to address and rectify Getty Center, Los Angeles X speaking at a 1963 rally in Harlem. It highlights the sheer injustice.” Amongst the other works on view are images Until 10 October number of individuals present – completely filling the frame. by well-known artists including Dorothea Lange, Robert Many of the featured pieces combine text and image – Mapplethorpe, William James Warren and An-My Lê. getty.edu/art
16 Aesthetica
Time to Pause and Reflect ERNST A. HEINIGER – GOOD MORNING, WORLD!
“Despite Heiniger’s worlds being admired by public and critics in the mid-20th century, his name is still largely absent from the canon of Swiss photographic history. Fotostiftung returned his archive from the US to Switzerland in 2014.”
Good Morning, World! Fotostiftung Schweiz Until 10 October fotostiftung.ch
Anonymous, The Circarama Circular Theatre of the SBB at Expo 64 in Lausanne, 1964 © Fotostiftung Schweiz
How do you create an original image? It’s a question that is their ability to present familiar objects and scenes anew is hard to grapple with in the digital age, when 95 million – observing the world from innovative, unpredictable photos are uploaded to Instagram each day. In 2021, ideas perspectives. They make you stop, pause and reflect. Innovation was a constant in Heiniger’s universe. He was are shared, developed, copied and deleted in seconds. In the 1930s, things were different. There was no internet, yet the always at the cutting edge of technology. In 1936, he medium was experiencing a different kind of boom: printed created Puszta-Pferde, one of the first modern photobooks images. At the forefront was Ernst A. Heiniger (1909-1993), a in Switzerland. Simultaneously, he worked with well-known photo retoucher by trade, who belonged to the avant-garde artists such as Heiri Steiner, Herbert Matter and Josef MüllerBrockmann on designs which combined photography of the Swiss “New Photography” movement. The characteristics of this fresh aesthetic included sharp- and graphics. It was an entirely novel concept at the time – ness, attention to detail, unusual perspectives, close-ups resulting in a series of posters that still feel timeless today. Above all, Heiniger was always pushing boundaries. In and multiple exposures. After only a short period as a selfemployed retoucher, Heiniger decided to learn how to take the early 1940s, he started to work with the moving-image, these kinds of shots himself. He made his customers an offer: producing his first films. By the 1950s, the photographer for the same price, they would receive a new, better print in- was travelling the world as a documentary filmmaker for the stead of a retouched one. He soon became a pioneer of the likes of industry giant Walt Disney. Two of his short films were movement, and one of the first lens-based creatives admit- given Academy Awards, and he later created Switzerland’s ted to the Swiss Werkbund – an association of artists, archi- first 360° experience for Expo 64 in Lausanne. Around four million people had seen it by the end of the event. tects, designers and industrialists established in 1913. Despite Heiniger’s worlds being admired by public and Good Morning, World! highlights a wealth of both black and white and colour images, notable for their precise rendering critics in the mid-20th century, his name is still largely absent of structures and forms. Bubbles collide, creating star from the canon of Swiss photographic history. Fotostiftung shapes in wine glasses. Water droplets rest on windowpanes. returned his archive from the USA to Switzerland in 2014. Spindly shadows stretch across the pavement – capturing Good Morning, World! is the first comprehensive retrospective cyclists from above. What is striking about these pictures since his death, delving into the imagination of a visionary.
Aesthetica 17
Eddo Hartmann, Trolley Bus, Somun Street, Pyongyang, 2015 From the series Setting the Stage, Pyongyang, North Korea, 2014-2017 Eddo Hartmann.
news
The Dangers of Exclusion IDEOLOGIES: US AND THEM The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation’s latest exhibition, Us and Them, has been two years in the making. It explores the ways in which we construct our identities, principally through acts of demarcation and of exclusion. It questions the mechanisms employed to nurture a sense of belonging, strength and control – ranging from the establishment of safety measures to the social creation of an “enemy.” Anne-Marie Beckmann, the Foundation’s Director, notes: “Globalisation, digital networking, the formation of large communities of states and international alliances seem to be bringing the world's population closer and closer together. At the same time, efforts to establish national boundaries are increasingly coming to light. The search for a common identity is not met with the idea of commonality, but compartmentalisation against a supposedly foreign threat.” The featured photograph, depicting an empty bus opposite flood-lit propaganda portraits, is taken from Eddo Hartmann’s (b. 1973) Setting the Stage series. Hartmann visited North Korea four times between 2014 and 2017, taking photographs in the capital Pyongyang, exploring a vast, often intimidating, impersonal and remarkably deserted landscape. Beckmann continues: “Hartmann’s images depict a country that, like no other, consciously dissociates itself from the rest of the world. The city primarily serves as a curious stage – set for the self-created myth of the authoritarian regime.”
18 Aesthetica
The Foundation is keen to demonstrate, however, that this “Efforts to establish sense of profiling and exclusion happens in many places. national boundaries Salvatore Vitale’s (b. 1986) series How to Secure a Country are increasingly takes place in Switzerland, revealing a highly militarised coming to light. state permeated by a far-reaching security system. Beck- The search for a mann explains: “For most people, any mention of Switzer- common identity is land conjures up the idea of an alpine idyll in the heart of not met with the idea Europe. Vitale reveals a very different perspective, detailing of commonality, but the ways in which his adopted country deals with military compartmentalisation border security, IT infrastructure, cyber crime and terrorism.” against a supposedly Elsewhere, audiences are presented with images about the foreign threat.” so-called “National Socialist Underground,” who were responsible for the racially motivated killings of nine people in Germany between 2000 and 2007. It was not until 2013 that the trial against the right-wing extremist terrorist group, which had long gone undetected, began. At that time, Hamburg photographer Paula Markert started to document the people and places associated with the group, piecing to- Ideologies: Us and Them gether the inconceivable events and their questionable pro- Deutsche Börse cessing, partly by state institutions. Whilst much of the truth Photography remains hidden, Markert succeeds in visualising a disturbing Foundation, Eschborn climate of fear. Ultimately, in an ever-divisive world, Beck- Until 19 September mann hopes that the show will “inspire visitors to think about how their own identification might be shaped by exclusion.” deutscheboersephotograph What can we learn from the past, and indeed, the present? yfoundation.org
Emotions in Opposition CHRISTOPHER THOMAS: BITTERSWEET zone. In such places, empty gymnasia and abandoned amusement parks are Thomas's subjects. He immortalises roller coasters, dolls and giant dinosaur statues left behind. There’s a conflicting, ever-evolving nature to Thomas's approach. “Some images in this series are staged, they are set up with quite some effort,” he explains. “Some are found, for some I travelled far – and for some I had to trespass … Sometimes a single shot can take weeks of preparation, travel, execution and finalisation, sometimes you have to be fast and silent.” Thomas, who has worked on the collection for around 10 years, has been described as “obsessed with the past.” In many ways, this is true. The artist is preoccupied with “places where something was and is no longer so” – destinations where time has shifted. Even as a young child, he enjoyed going to the very same festival year-on-year, returning simply to imagine how the event used to be, living in a bed of memories as opposed to the present moment. Nostalgia is part and parcel of the human experience – tied to the senses. Sounds, smells and sights evoke memories involuntarily and take us back to distinct points in time. In referencing the forgotten icons of youth, Thomas reminds us of our complex existence, and the multitudinous nature of memories – each one tinged with happiness, sadness or something in the middle. “I like it when a piece of art succeeds in striking not only one chord, but several,” he concludes.
“Oxymorons are words which place two contradictory terms in conjunction. Thomas's images do exactly that, capturing merry-gorounds, ice cream cones, circus tents and Ferris wheels within desolate landscapes.”
Bittersweet Ira Stehmann Fine Art, Munich Until 31 August irastehmann.com
Bittersweet 102, 2020, © Christopher Thomas, courtesy Ira Stehmann Fine Art, Munich, Germany.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest recorded use of the of the word “bittersweet” – meaning pleasure tinged with sadness or pain – is in Chaucer’s The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale (1387). Today, the oxymoron is well recognised, appearing perhaps most famously within English rock band The Verve’s 1997's Bitter Sweet Symphony. It’s now the name of Munich-based photographer Christopher Thomas’s latest exhibition, on view at Ira Stehmann Fine Art. Oxymorons are words which place two contradictory terms in conjunction. Thomas's images do exactly that, capturing merry-go-rounds, ice cream cones, bubble gum machines, circus tents and Ferris wheels within desolate landscapes. On first glance, their glowing lights and warm colours bring to mind childhood memories and nostalgia. A sense of darkness begins to creep into the frame with each viewing; ultimately Bittersweet revolves around such oppositions. “It is about joy and fear, melancholia and warmth, gain and loss, the beginning and the end, and the whole time in-between,” he says. “It's about time and how everything changes.” Thomas's pictorial worlds are, typically, steeped in decay and transience. The artist has travelled to notable locations across the globe, including Chernobyl in Ukraine, which was scarred by the nuclear reactor disaster in 1986. The nearest city, Pripyat, home to around 50,000 people, was evacuated along with other communities in a 4,000 kilometre squared
Aesthetica 19
art
10 to See RECOMMENDED EXHIBITIONS THIS SEASON
Our list of summer exhibitions is diverse, with pivotal shows that examine what makes us human. We cover everything from fashion photography and eye-opening documentaries to the latest developments in technology, digital installations and live programming.
1
Observations on Being Charterhouse Heritage Park, Coventry | Until 15 August
marshmallowlaserfeast.com Marshmallow Laser Feast is one of the world’s leading immersive art collectives, inviting participants to navigate new worlds beyond the parameters of daily experience. Observations on Being, a new collaboration with Coventry UK City of Culture, includes seven meditative artworks that explore a sense of interconnectedness with the natural world, whilst investigating human relationships around the inevitable cycles of life and death. In these spaces, artists push the boundaries of sensory perception, revealing innate networks and systems.
2
Deceptive Images
Marta Herford, Herford | Until 15 August
marta-herford.de In 1981, Man Ray stated: “I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive. I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence.” This infamous quotation acts as a cornerstone for Marta Herford’s latest show, which considers the “truth” behind images – and how much viewers can trust in their own interpretation of visual information. Featured works include Anthony McCall's You and I (II), including three-dimensional forms of light.
3
The Fall Museum Folkwang, Essen | Until 26 September
1
museum-folkwang.de Tobias Zielony (b. 1973) might not be the world's best-known photographer, but he is fast becoming one of Germany's most talked-about documentarians, working across both still and moving imagery. His portraits predominantly focus on peripheral subcultures, individuals and communities – from skater parks to underground LGBTQ+ clubs – critiquing the ways in which society marginalises and separates. Each image offers an intriguing level of tension between intimacy and disconnect, observing young adults from a considered distance.
4
GETXO PHOTO 2021 Photo Festival, Basque Country | 2-26 September
getxophoto.com The ethos of GETXO International Image Festival has, for the last 14 years, been to “propose a conversation with society on topics that affect us as citizens; recovering urban spaces for cultural uses, bringing us closer and betting on the exploration of non-conventional formats.” The 2021 edition is focused on the theme To Share. It features many photographers including Juliana Gómez Quijano (Juno), whose series Las dos Hebras (The Two Strands) explores that which makes us similar, alluding to the double helix that makes up our genetic structure.
5
Sutapa Biswas: Lumen Baltic, Gateshead | Until 20 March
baltic.art In an interview with The Art Newspaper this June, Biswas stated: “Our reckoning with empire has certainly begun, but we’ve only scratched the surface.” The British Indian artist's personal history overlaps with the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades, moving to post-emancipation Britain. Lumen is provocative and disruptive – bringing together photography, performance and the moving image, highlighting recurring themes of motherhood, migration, memory and loss. Biswas digs deep into colonial histories, with pivotal work that provokes and inspires.
20 Aesthetica
2
3
4
5
Aesthetica 21
8
6
9
7
22 Aesthetica
10
6
Coexistence Fotografiska, Stockholm | Until 29 August
fotografiska.com Cho Gi-Seok’s (b. 1992) analogue portraits are unique. Plastic toy sharks surround a model’s face like a maritime halo. Butterflies adorn bare backs and petals obscure eyelids. This is a world of unconventional beauty that is at once alluring, unsettling and utterly transfixing. Fotografiska Stockholm brings together a series of the fashion photographer’s key works, all characterised by elaborate composition and careful execution. The focus here is on coexistence: stones, trees, animals, spaces and humans destined to collide, one way or another.
7
Photo London 2021 Somerset House, London | 9-12 September
photolondon.org Photo London returns to Somerset House this September, with exhibitors from over 14 countries. This year, however, the fair recognises the need for a change in programming, focusing more heavily on the online sphere and international audiences. As Founders Michael Benson and Fariba Farshad note: “We have learned a great deal in the past year and, as a result, the sixth edition of Photo London will be very different to the first five. The Fair’s digital footprint is now touching every aspect of the operation, from talks and events, to a shift away from print.”
8
The Best Hamiltons Gallery, London | Until 13 August
hamiltonsgallery.com To celebrate the mass re-opening of UK galleries, Hamiltons brings together works from the archives of a near 40-year history. Iconic images from the 20th century are displayed next to the most recent developments in digital imagery. These rare pieces are a must-see for those that have been missing the exhibition space, offering a whistle-stop tour of photography over the last 100 years, from gelatin silver to dye transfer and vintage selenium prints. Featuring Irving Penn, Don McCullin, Herb Ritts, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton and Mario Testino.
9
Art on the Conditions of our Time Kettle's Yard, Cambridge | Until 3 October
kettlesyard.co.uk Untitled examines the current cultural zeitgeist – a time of social, cultural and political turbulence – through the prism of Black British artists. It does this, however, with a bold new approach. Curator Paul Goodwin notes: “Instead of focusing on Blackness ahead of the works, Untitled flips the order and focuses on the pieces first and foremost. Questions of race and identity are then shown to be entangled in the multitude of concerns – aesthetic, material and political – which viewers can encounter without the curatorial voice obscuring the art."
10
New Ways of Seeing Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main | Until 24 October
staedelmuseum.de Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, German photography oscillated between innovation and continuity, reflecting the aftermath of WWI and projecting the tensions leading to WWII. Städel Museum considers this time as a creative crucible. Kristina Lemke, Head of Photography, expands: “Unlike the vilification of the avant-garde in the visual arts, there were no artistic restrictions in photography – modern imagery had already firmly established itself in visual memory and was used in the National Socialist state for propagandistic purposes.”
1. Marshmallow Laser Feast, Observations On Being, Coventry City of Culture 2021. Installation image of We Live in an Ocean of Air Video Edition. Photo by David Levene. 2. Anthony McCall, You and I (II), 2010. Installation view, Ambica P3, London, 2011. Photo by Stephen White. © Courtesy of the artist, Sean Kelly, New York and Sprüth Magers, Berlin/London. 3. Tobias Zielony, Snakepool, 2020. Inkjet-Print, 120cm x 80 cm. Courtesy KOW, Berlin. 4. Juliana Gómez Quijano (Juno), Las dos hebras (The Two Strands). Courtesy of GETXO Photo. 5. Sutapa Biswas, Light Rain, 2015 (production still). Made possible thanks to the generous support of Beppu Projects, Agency for Cultural Affairs Government of Japan, the Kashima Residency 2015. Sutapa Biswas. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2021. 6. © Cho Gi-Seok, Nostalgia #2 (2020). 7. Jessica Backhaus, Cut Out #13, 2020. Archival Pigment Print. 112.5cm x 75 cm. © Jessica Backhaus. Courtesy Robert Morat Galerie. 8. Herb Ritts, Versace Dress (Back View), El Mirage 1990. © Herb Ritts Foundation. 9. Barby Asante, As Always a Painful Declaration of Independence – For Ama. For Aba. For Charlotte and Adjoh: Intimacy and Distance, 2017. Diaspora Pavilion, Venice. Image: Jess Harrington. 10. Hans Finsler, Cup, Saucer and Plate, 1931. Gelatin silver print on baryta paper. 16,4 × 22,9 cm. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Eigentum des Städelschen Museums-Vereins e.V. © Estate Hans Finsler. Photo: Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.
Aesthetica 23
art
Disparate Geographies Massimo Colonna
Massimo Colonna (b. 1986) is an Italian photographer, post-producer and retoucher who invents spaces that play with a sense of reality. His captivating portfolio is defined by vast open expanses, all shot on level playing fields. As viewers, we are often asked to gaze across similar horizon lines, considering their similarities and differences, from abundant landscapes to sparse concrete quarries. The Isolation series, for example, features stranded chairs, ladders and rubber rings amidst rolling fields spilling with pink, yellow and green plant life. It’s as if the world has been left to its own acts of rewilding, devoid of human presence. Meanwhile, the Global Warming series takes a stark grey quarry as its setting, with undulating piles of sand, rocks and sediment set amongst stark, browning trees. Ice creams melt into the tarmac, whilst plastic straws protrude from a drying puddle. massimocolonna.com.
Massimo Colonna, from Isolation. Courtesy of the artist.
24 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 25
26 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 27
Massimo Colonna, from Ti trovo cambiato (Global Warming) . Courtesy of the artist.
28 Aesthetica
Massimo Colonna, from Isolation. Courtesy of the artist.
Aesthetica 29
30 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 31
Massimo Colonna, from Ti trovo cambiato (Global Warming) . Courtesy of the artist.
32 Aesthetica
Massimo Colonna, from Isolation. Courtesy of the artist.
Aesthetica 33
art
Playful Camouflage Gerwyn Davies
In 2021, we are presented with seemingly endless possibilities to reinvent ourselves. With one swipe, crop, or filter, we can become something new, metamorphosing multiple times a day. Gerwyn Davies (b. 1985) is an Australian photographer who explores this concept with images that both empower and conceal, combining hand-made costumes and strategic digital edits. Tessellating white folds, curved orange cones, glittering yellow ribbons and golden pyramids protrude from bodies as if they were second sets of skin. Davies expands: “The double bind of a figure both conspicuous and nowhere to be seen, hiding in plain sight, is indicative of my investment in queering the act of representation and renegotiating the terms of visibility. I adopt the excessive aesthetics of Camp, and explore the potential for performative self-presentations to become queer cocoons, inside which artists redistribute their bodies and crystallise into new formations.” gerwyndavies.com.
Gerwyn Davies, Caravan (2020).
34 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 35
36 Aesthetica
Gerwyn Davies, Okinawa 1 (2018).
Aesthetica 37
38 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 39
Gerwyn Davies, Coral Sands (2020).
40 Aesthetica
Gerwyn Davies, Opera (2017).
Aesthetica 41
42 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 43
Gerwyn Davies, Spilt Milk (2017)..
44 Aesthetica
Gerwyn Davies, Okinawa II (2018).
Aesthetica 45
art
Hybrid Architecture Santa Fe Modern SANTA FE IS A CREATIVE HOTBED, MIXING CONTEMPORARY MODERNISM WITH ADOBE TRADITION, RECALIBRATING CONNECTIONS TO THE LANDSCAPE IN THE PROCESS.
In 1917, Georgia O’Keeffe spent a few days in Santa Fe, New table book and she’s nailed it – Santa Fe Modern would look Mexico, and was instantly smitten. “There is so much more good in the centre of any room, however, it also provides a space between the ground and sky out here it is tremendous. much deeper conversation and approach to the natural and I want to stay,” she wrote to her husband, the photographer built environment. Thompson’s sheer enthusiasm for Santa Alfred Stieglitz. By 1929 she was back, and soon spending Fe comes across, and well it might. “I lived in Austin, Texas, for most of her time in the southwestern state. In 1940 she all of my life, but I came up here to work on this publication bought a property on Ghost Ranch, a 21,000-acre retreat and just stayed,” she laughs. “I like it here.” It’s easy to see why. Surrounded by the Jemez and Sangre and education centre located close to the village of Abiquiú in Rio Arriba County. She installed large picture windows, de Cristo Mountains, Santa Fe sits on a desert plain, which and furnished it in mid-century style, but the house itself was gives it the open skies and sense of space that so struck traditional, built from adobe (earth, clay and straw) and in O’Keeffe. It also gives a clear scope of the land, and the agesthe style of indigenous populations. O’Keeffe was known as old processes that have made it. It’s easy to think in terms of the “Mother of American Modernism,” but for her, the ancient eons not epochs there, and to therefore collapse the distance and the cutting-edge merged comfortably in New Mexico. As between planetary time, indigenous peoples, 20th century design writer Helen Thompson (Elle Decor, Country Home Modernism and contemporary inhabitants. and Architectural Digest) points out, after moving to the area: New Mexico has long attracted artists and their patrons “Every painting she did is of the geology, of the mountains – including Mabel Dodge Luhan, who originally invited outside the window and those plateaux. They're of the land.” O’Keeffe the area, or more recent makers such as the Thompson is about to publish a title with Monacelli, which minimalist sculptor John McCracken and art dealer Max explores the connection between New Mexico’s landscape, its Protetch. Thompson says the desert landscape draws in free ancient buildings and 21st century architecture, working with spirits because it’s so far removed from conventional lawns photographer Casey Dunn. It’s the third book the pair have and white-picket fences. The quality of the light in Santa Fe is made together, after two other very successful collabora- also a pull, though, because the city sits at 7,000 ft above sea tions, Texas Made/Texas Modern: The House and the Land, and level. Whatever the reason, the city packs a cultural punch Marfa Modern: Artistic Interiors of the West Texas High Desert. well above its size, home to just 85,000 people, dozens of Their new publication is titled Santa Fe Modern, and focuses private galleries, and an institution called SITE Santa Fe, on 20 houses in the town, each quite distinct but equally ar- which ran the USA’s first international art biennial in 1995. Santa Fe is also the capital of New Mexico and was resting in their combination of the age-old and the cuttingedge. Thompson says she didn’t want to just make a coffee officially founded in 1609 by Spanish settlers, which makes
46 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 47
48 Aesthetica
Stucco, glass, and stone residence by Studio Dubois. Santa Fe. Photo by Casey Dunn.
“Perhaps living in this compelling environment, in which the elements, geology and value of ancient traditions are so clear, gives people a different relationship with time – allowing our instincts to recalibrate.”
Previous Page: House by Ralph Ridgeway. Santa Fe. Photo by Casey Dunn. Left: Stucco house by Van Amburgh+Pares+Co. (constructed around an old adobe house.) Santa Fe. Photo by Casey Dunn.
it the oldest capital in the USA. However, it was inhabited strategies to deal with desert living. Whilst there are houses long before that by the local Pueblo or Native American that look more contemporary, they resort to former methods.” Thompson is passionate about site-specific architecture, communities, some of which live on today (having survived the arrival of the Europeans). The Tesuque and Nambé “a Modernism that looks like it belongs,” and as she points Pueblo are not far, and indigenous low-level adobe and cliff- out, Santa Fe pretty much demands it. The sun is powerful side houses can be seen across the state and beyond. Simple and temperatures can reach up to 38 degrees centigrade and stark, these homes have a minimal look that echoes 20th in summer, yet it can also snow in winter – as Dunn shows century Modernism, and O’Keeffe wasn’t alone in noticing in some wintry shots. It’s extreme, and that means homes the links. Local architect John Gaw Meem helped spearhead here have to offer protection. One property, for example, a so-called “Pueblo Revival” across the 1920s and 1930s, for has been designed to minimise direct sunshine, so that the example, combining this architecture with the international owner's photographs and prints are not destroyed by the light. In Modernist architecture, form follows function, and in Modernist movement to create a pared-down hybrid. Gaw Meem, who was born in Brazil in 1894 but settled Santa Fe that’s a conscious decision and then some. Furthermore, it’s not just the climate that’s uncompromising. in New Mexico in 1920, also helped to define Santa Fe’s distinctive aesthetic, leading a committee that wrote the Santa Fe’s terrain is rocky and mountainous, and, like the 1957 Historical Zoning Ordinance – strict planning laws indigenous people, newer residents have often found it’s that determined that “all future buildings in central Santa better to go with the flow than try to fight it. Some homes Fe adhere to the idioms of the Old Quarter” or, if outside are built right into a cliff – something people have done that specific area, be of sympathetic materials, colours and for thousands of years; the raw rock left on-show to create proportions. It sounds onerous and sometimes is, as one of a jaw-dropping feature in an already impressive property. the founders of SITE, Laura Carpenter, ruefully attests in the In another home, the owner couldn’t extend horizontally, foreword to Santa Fe Modern, in which she writes of a battle because it would involve chiselling away at a hill, so instead, to keep her old town building painted yellow [she argued, he built on top – a process familiar with Pueblo homes. “The concept of ‘adding on’ is ancient. People here have always successfully, the colour predated the laws]. However, as Thompson points out, using age-old methods built onto their houses in an organic way,” says Thompson. Santa Fe has a less precious aesthetic than elsewhere isn’t just an aesthetic choice. It’s also a sensible, tried-andtested response to the environment. “It’s rather harsh here,” though, a place in which “imperfection is welcome.” Accordshe says. “You have to figure out ways to incorporate the ingly, whilst all the homes are extremely beautiful – and landscape. That’s what the big windows do [giving stunning some are unquestionably show-stoppers– they’re not necesviews], but they all also have the large porches that make it sarily “sleek.” Thompson says she didn’t want the publication bearable to be outside when it’s hot. These are longstanding to look like “a real estate catalogue” and so there are some
Aesthetica 49
Stucco house by Van Amburgh+Pares+Co. (Constructed around an old adobe house.) Santa Fe. Photo by Casey Dunn. Right:
quirky abodes, such as “a rambling 1940s house” that had a slowly torn apart – is a 25 million-year-old scar that emerges Stucco residence and landscape by Seth Anderson. Santa Fe. Photo by colourful past as a bar / restaurant and “a free-spirited floor- at Leadville, Colorado, and comes to a stop in Chihuahua, Casey Dunn. ing scheme.” Materials are brought together in an improvisa- Mexico. Santa Fe is right in the middle of it.” This attention to the topography feeds through into an tional way; rather than ripping it up and starting again, the appreciation of raw elements, recalling another key tenet of current owners just added in another texture. Santa Fe Modern also features some relatively modest modernist architecture – “truth to materials.” Many properties properties, such as a 900-square-foot home. Designed to in Santa Fe feature Viga ceilings, huge wooden rafters which, be environmentally conscious, this particular house is also along with the latillas (or laths) are usually left exposed to quite literally friendly to nature – the living area has two view. In Pueblo homes, these Viga beams can simply be walls of glass sliding doors and, when they’re opened up, mighty logs, the branches and bark stripped off to the wood. birds come and freely fly through. This ability to blur interior There’s also a residence that uses rammed earth for a feature and exterior adds a sense of open expanse and possibility wall, a technique that’s been employed around the world for to compact residences, but it’s also second nature in New millennia, but which is particularly appealing here because Mexico: “Even the cliff dwellings had gathering space where of the pink or tan colour of the sedimentary rock. The décor of these residences pays similar attention to you could see the sky.” Santa Fe Modern also includes a home in which a James Turrell Skyspace has been installed natural raw ecologies – just as O’Keeffe decorated her home (a commission that typically costs up to $2 million) for with simple rocks and shells. There’s a shady courtyard which example, a specifically proportioned chamber with an open uses a piece of solid stone for an outside table, for example, aperture in the ceiling. Turrell is an avid pilot and considers surrounded by elegant (and also dusty pink) Driade chairs. the sky his studio; so, naturally, his artwork has found a There are also many traditional objects and artefacts which natural home in Santa Fe, with the infamous Skyspace model are scattered throughout the landscape and its architecture – based on Turrell’s belief that “everyone has a light in them, Zulu clay pots, for example, or Ashanti stools, vintage Navajo Words blankets or Acoma ollas. Santa Fe’s most stylish homeowners Diane Smyth and we come together to find that light again and again.” The geography is, therefore, a huge draw. Reaching far back appreciate fine design whatever its provenance, as did John in time, Thompson explains the historical processes that Gaw Meem, O’Keeffe and other Modernist pioneers. Although it’s not peculiar to Santa Fe, it’s an approach have shaped the landscape and, though she laughs that she “wrote a lot about geology,” it makes for a compelling read. that may be particularly apt here. Perhaps living in this Santa Fe Modern The view from one porch is “not immediately recognisable compelling environment, in which the elements, geology is published by for what it is”, then adds that it’s actually “a 40-mile-wide and value of ancient traditions are so clear, gives people a Monacelli depression, one of three large basins that are part of the different relationship with time – allowing our instincts to Rio Grande rift. This rift – or linear zone whose crust is being recalibrate, and the five senses to be constantly reinvigorated. monacellipress.com
50 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 51
art
A Fresh Perspective Thandiwe Muriu
In January 2021, Thandiwe Muriu was interviewed for UNESCO’s Diversity of Cultural Expressions. In the article, she states that “starting out as a professional photographer was not easy. Entrepreneurship is a relatively new path in Kenya, so banks did not offer me a loan. I reinvested the money I earned from shoots to buy equipment. It took me a while to collect everything I needed. There was also a stigma to fight. Many people saw photography as a side job whilst you find a “real career” – Plan C or D at best. It was hard knowing that people thought it was my hobby and I was not contributing to Kenya's development.” Muriu has, since then, been widely lauded for her distinctive style, showcasing Africa’s unique heritage of cultures and vibrant colour palettes, including being featured as one of CNN’s African Voices Changemakers in 2019. The following works are clean, crisp and elegant, demonstrating the skill and vision of a rising star. thandiwemuriu.com.
Model: @belengakuany. Makeup: Sinitta Akello @sinittaakello. Clothing: AAchera Atelier @a_achera. Photographer: Thandiwe Muriu @thandiwe_muriu.
52 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 53
54 Aesthetica
Model: @belengakuany. Makeup: Sinitta Akello @sinittaakello. Clothing: AAchera Atelier @a_achera. Photographer: Thandiwe Muriu @thandiwe_muriu.
Aesthetica 55
Model: @belengakuany. Makeup: Sinitta Akello @sinittaakello. Clothing: AAchera Atelier @a_achera. Photographer: Thandiwe Muriu @thandiwe_muriu.
56 Aesthetica
Model: @belengakuany. Makeup: Sinitta Akello @sinittaakello. Clothing: AAchera Atelier @a_achera. Photographer: Thandiwe Muriu @thandiwe_muriu.
Aesthetica 57
Model: @belengakuany. Makeup: Sinitta Akello @sinittaakello. Clothing: AAchera Atelier @a_achera. Photographer: Thandiwe Muriu @thandiwe_muriu.
58 Aesthetica
Model: @belengakuany. Makeup: Sinitta Akello @sinittaakello. Clothing: AAchera Atelier @a_achera. Photographer: Thandiwe Muriu @thandiwe_muriu.
Aesthetica 59
Model: @belengakuany. Makeup: Sinitta Akello @sinittaakello. Clothing: AAchera Atelier @a_achera. Photographer: Thandiwe Muriu @thandiwe_muriu.
art
Mapping the Climate Tristes Tropiques RICHARD MOSSE USES NEW IMAGING METHODS TO RECONTEXTUALISE ECOLOGICAL CATASTROPHE. HIS LATEST PROJECT TURNS THE LENS ON DESTRUCTION IN THE AMAZON.
Like most technological innovations, multispectral photog- somehow seem unreal. One extraordinary 2009 shot shows raphy is politically neutral in and of itself. It means that the a group of US soldiers around a rubble-filled swimming pool camera can reveal generally invisible parts of the colour in the bombed-out palace of Saddam Hussein’s son (Ruined spectrum such as infrared and ultraviolet, whilst also allow- swimming pool at Uday’s Palace, Jebel Makhoul, Iraq). For the breakthrough Infra (2012) series, however, Mosse ing them to isolate and enhance single tones such as blues, greens and reds. This technique has been employed to map turned to a more formally adventurous means of estrangeearth’s vegetation and coastlines from outer space with new ment. The subject was Kivu in DR Congo, a mineral-rich levels of detail, but it has also been used by military forces region shattered by successive waves of violence stretching back decades, most recently fomented by rebel militias in around the world to track and kill human beings. The application of multispectral photography in the Amazon flight from the Rwandan Civil War of 1990-1994. The artist presents a more specific moral conflict. Environmentalists travelled the area with an obsolete military reconnaissance harness the unique optics of the form to trace the destruction camera that picked up infrared light – much of it absorbed caused through deforestation and mining, but the very and reflected by plants – transforming the lush Congolese agribusinesses and mining mineralogists causing harm can undergrowth into a surreal dreamscape of magenta and use the same devices to identify new sites for burning and crimson. The project brought an arresting backdrop to an digging. Richard Mosse’s (b. 1980) Tristes Tropiques series, ongoing scene of human devastation, thereby forcing viewcreated by flying photographic drones across Brazil’s so- ers to sit up and notice. The accompanying audio-visual work called “arc of fire,” uses enhanced colour spectra not just to The Enclave (2012) used the same infrared camera to depict draw attention to a ravaged ecosystem, but also to suggest rebel soldiers training against the tall grasses and foliage, the conflicted roles of science and cartography in both their gestures and expressions becoming simultaneously more aggressive and more theatrical as the shoot progressed. preserving and overrunning the natural world. “When you've seen this work, you'll never forget the Congo,” Mosse is an Irish artist whose work has long harnessed the photographic medium in bold news ways. He forces viewers says Urs Stahel, the curator of Displaced, a major mid-career to look again at images of catastrophe, counteracting the retrospective running at the Fondazione MAST, Bologna. The numbing effects of constant news cycles and social media principle of “making new” – which ultimately powers Mosse’s posts, making us confront these subjects as if for the first creativity – also applies to the more recent series Heat Maps time. Early in his career, he travelled to conflict zones from and Incoming (both 2017) in which heat-sensitive imaging reKosovo to Iraq, documenting the human aftermath of war veals the movement of human bodies across refugee camps and violence, situations in which habitual human behaviour in Europe and the Middle East as a ghostly silvery mass.
60 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 61
62 Aesthetica
Burnt Pantanal II, Tristes Tropiques. © Richard Mosse. Images courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery and carlier | gebauer.
“Mosse often speaks of art in terms reminiscent of Irish author Samuel Beckett: as a process of coming to terms with a failure of expression. However, a solution of sorts came when he began to research the photography used in environmental monitoring satellites.”
Previous Page: Mineral Ship, Crepori River, State of Para, Brazil, 2020. © Richard Mosse. Courtesy of the artist and carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid. Left: Burnt Pantanal I, Tristes Tropiques. © Richard Mosse. Images courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery and carlier | gebauer.
Over the last few years, however, Mosse has focused on what he calls “environmental crime,” and to a technology discovered, according to a recent interview with The Monocle, after pondering how to adequately depict the effects of human activities in the Amazon. Faced with “the extensive media blitz coverage of burning rainforest” during summer 2019, the artist became “intrigued by the challenge of representing climate change and environmental catastrophe. Because it’s just so bloody difficult. It’s outside the limits of human perception, the limits of language. It’s way bigger than us. And for that reason, it’s very difficult to photograph.” Mosse often speaks of art in terms reminiscent of Irish author Samuel Beckett (1906-1989): as a process of coming to terms with a failure of expression. However, a solution of sorts came when he began to research the photography used in environmental monitoring satellites, which move across the earth at high speed recording its topology. The enhanced reds, greens and blues of the different visual “bandwidths,” as well as the invisible spectra of UV and infrared, are used to record processes such as the release of carbon dioxide. At the same time, Mosse recalls, “some of the maps they were producing were very aesthetically powerful.” This was the spur to the still-evolving set of images known as Tristes Tropiques. The title references a memoir by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) which recorded his travels throughout Brazil – a nod to the historically complex interaction of western intellectuals with indigenous communities who inhabit many of the areas now at risk from fire and felling. As Stahel explains, drones were flown in rectangular grid patterns across vast swaths of the Brazilian interior, generating sets of pictures which were then stitched together to
create a form of “counter-mapping:” “not mapping to use the world, but to make people aware how we are misusing it.” These compositions captivate audiences with beauty but then, almost immediately, make us question the terms of our enchantment. Copper-orange canopies give way to textured white plains. Bright pink riverbanks articulate the fringes of deep opalescent masses, where blues, greens and greys intermingle as if in intergalactic space. These are compositions which truly “estrange” – allowing a process of imaginative reacquaintance with subject-matter. At the same time, viewers are left wondering what it means to encounter an image of planetary destruction as sublime, awe-inspiring even. For the colour palettes which convey these moods are also models of disorder: they record the deliberate blazes caused by cattle ranchers clearing space for their herds; the release of poisonous mercury into rivers through the detonations and extraction of gold miners; the steady seep of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at points of concentrated release. “Lots of younger artists say we have to renew the images of climate change,” Stahel notes, “and I always think we should immediately tell them: look at Richard Mosse!” As the curator suggests, Mosse is not the only photographer or multi-media creative working to shed new light on the threats posed by and towards humanity – and those who also inhabit the planet. For example, Mishka Henner’s (b. 1976) Feedlots is a profoundly bleak set of satellite photographs showing huge, gridded feeding pens on arid land in Texas, flanked by luminous cesspools of animal waste mingling with polluting chemicals. The scale and formal allure of these images is such that viewers are forced to scrutinise them closely to realise what they are seeing: that the black dots peppering
Aesthetica 63
Felled Brazil Nut Tree, Tristes Tropiques. © Richard Mosse. Images courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery and carlier | gebauer.
the landscape are living beings, a multitude of farmed cattle. Intermedia artists such as Michael Wang (b. 1981) have taken a different tack, using three-dimensional forms and live installation to reacquaint audiences with what they already know, but don’t want to feel, about their relationship with the planet. Wang’s 2017 exhibition Extinct in the Wild, at the Fondazione Prada, Milan, brought together a range of flora and fauna exclusively preserved in cultivation or captivity. Wang’s installation, which presented species no longer found in nature with clinical, lab-style lighting and décor, highlighted the extent to which human “progress” has reduced the organic world to a passive object of study, whilst industry and commerce have made a desert of the wildness beyond. By contrast, practitioners such as Daisy Ginsberg (b. 1982) have used imaginative mapping, architectural drawing and VR modelling to propose ways in which nature might evolve to survive the onslaught caused by the human race. These individuals – and, indeed, many others – use new creative and technical approaches to freshen the visual and sensory languages employed to communicate the climate emergency to a wider audience. What sets Mosse’s work apart, undoubtedly, is its beauty, and the way in which these arresting aesthetics confront how we perceive and consume the essence of catastrophe. In a society of pervasive advertising and media spectacle, perhaps only stunning technicolour could rouse us from apathy, much as Andy Warhol’s neon silkscreens of car wreckages reflected back the appetite for glamourised tragedy. In lacing transcendent images with this stinging message, the artist of climate disaster also becomes an artist of – and against – photography. All of this nudges us towards a debate initiated by Susan
64 Aesthetica
Sontag’s 1977 book On Photography, which continues to bubble within the pictorial community and culture at large. In short, can photographs ever do more than offer a distracting or mystifying spectacle? Can they motivate us to act for positive change on a topic such as ecological destruction? Whilst Sontag’s position was that they cannot – at least not on their own – a new generation of critics has guardedly revised such perspectives. Meanwhile, images circulating across the globe for the last half-century – from a selfimmolating Vietnamese monk (Malcolm Browne, 1963) to a naked child burned with napalm (Nick Ut, 1972) to horrifying shots of tortured inmates at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq War – have become talismans for political opposition to the atrocities committed by western governments. The question of whether or not photography can change the world – or prompt us to change it – is as difficult to answer as the broader question of art's social value. However, the allure of Mosse’s work is not merely a way of prompting self-critique on the way we engage with climate chaos or genocide. By contrast, the artist is emotionally entwined with the communities and landscapes he documents, and wants the dazzle of the image to serve as a spur to reflection, and ideally action. “He is interested in the context of the conflict, whether in society or nature,” Stahel explains. “He is not the kind of photographer who gets paid to go somewhere for two weeks and leaves. He goes back for years. He went to the DR Congo for five years, and knew the people, going back in order to show them the photographs. It was a conscious decision to work like this, and he is doing it in Brazil too. But still,” Stahel concludes, “Mosse believes in the visual power of the image.” It is beauty, it seems, that will change the world.
Right: Gold Pit, Paraprint, Tristes Tropiques. © Richard Mosse. Images courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery and carlier | gebauer.
Words Greg Thomas
Displaced: Richard Mosse Fondazione MAST, Bolonga Until 19 September mast.org
Aesthetica 65
art
Shooting Hyperreality Benoit Paillé
Magical Realism Nihilism Pole, is, for Benoit Paillé (b. 1984) not only an image series, but a “revolutionary act” – demonstrating how photography doesn't, in fact, capture reality, but is an active creator of reality. Here, photography is capable of elevating the most perceivably uninteresting object into something enticing, desirable and ultra-magnified. He notes: “It is play: a game for me. Instead of taking photos of a beautiful landscape, I will choose the pole time and again.” The “pole” – in Paillé’s methodology – is a placeholder for any banal object, from fences and hedges to street lamps, which he transforms through a phantasmic colour scheme. Bright, stark flashes render surreal interpretations of the landscape, which are both hyperreal and vividly idiosyncratic, seeking out the unexpected and the unseen. Paillé defines himself as an atypical artist and conscious agitator, living on the road in a camper van whilst shooting projects across the globe. gbuffer.myportfolio.com.
Benoit Paillé, Untitled, Mexico (2016). Courtesy of the artist.
66 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 67
Benoit Paillé, Always There Decor, Tuxtla, Chiapas (2016). Courtesy of the artist.
68 Aesthetica
Benoit Paillé, L’Abrutissement du faux. Courtesy of the artist.
Aesthetica 69
Benoit Paillé, Untitled, Guatemala (2016). Courtesy of the artist.
70 Aesthetica
Benoit Paillé, Untitled, Guatemala (2016). Courtesy of the artist.
Aesthetica 71
Benoit Paillé, Lightpole, Tuxtla, Chiapa, Mexico (2016). Courtesy of the artist.
72 Aesthetica
Benoit Paillé, Tulum, Quintanaroo, Mexico (2016). Courtesy of the artist.
Aesthetica 73
Benoit Paillé, Volcan sanpedro, Lago atitlan (2017). Courtesy of the artist.
74 Aesthetica
Benoit Paillé, Landscape 1, Sanchristobal, chiapas, Mexico (2016). Courtesy of the artist.
Aesthetica 75
art
Cultural Iconography Namsa Leuba VIVID COLOUR PALETTES AND BOLD SYMBOLISM CHARACTERISE THESE ICONIC PHOTOGRAPHS, WHICH EXPLORE THE DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN LOOKING AND SEEING.
"I have always been characterised as the 'Other', whether I am too 'African' to be European, or too 'European' to be African." Namsa Leuba (b. 1982) is a Swiss-Guinean photographer and art director who focuses on African identity as seen through the western gaze, challenging the legacies of colonial perspectives. Each image includes bold backgrounds, authentic props and original styling, exploring the various signs and symbols of mixed cultural heritages. In one shot, porcelain cheetahs surround a model wearing Nike trainers. In another, a seated figure wears wedged creeper shoes, a style originally developed by George Cox in 1949, inspired by the crêpe-soled desert boots worn by WWII soldiers stationed across the desert of North Africa. Elsewhere, a model stares, objectively, at the viewer, straddling an animal skin, adorned by gold Dr. Martens – a style of boot which dates back to Northamptonshire in 1901, made originally as sturdy footwear for Britain's working classes. Pluralism and hybridity are common threads across these insightful projects, from portraits of non-binary communities in Tahiti to staged fashion commissions – featuring various collages, overlapping patterns and repeated motifs. Leuba’s first monograph, Crossed Looks, is published by Damiani this summer. It features some of her major projects, including series shot in Guinea, South Africa, Nigeria and Benin. Over 100 images consider the representation of the cultural "Other" – including various adaptations of mythologies and ceremonies, as well as an acknowledgement of cross-dialogues between global cultures. The publication accompanies Leuba's first solo exhibition in the USA, held
76 Aesthetica
at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina, which runs 27 August -11 December. We sit down with Leuba to discuss the key tenets of her practice, and the layers of meaning to uncover in each image. A: Where did your journey into photography begin? NL: It all began in Switzerland. Here, I studied for a Bachelor’s degree in visual communication, then for a Master’s in art direction at the University of Art and Design Lausanne ECAL. Photography, as a means of revealing information through the lens, has fascinated me for years. It is a way of expressing oneself, giving free rein to the most personal ideas, and that suits me perfectly. In addition, the photograph has become an integral part of our current mode of communication, and I seek to understand this. The old adage is true that an image is often worth more than a thousand words put together. A: You once noted, in an interview with Nataal magazine, that “there is a great richness in being of mixed cultures.” How has your heritage influenced your practice? NL: My main source of inspiration is my heritage – my double origin – and the diversity of exchanges I have had over the years. I define my visual identity through these – both pictorially and conceptually – evoking a range of emotions and multifaceted existences. I am inspired by my duality, and the different codes I have learned as part of this. It is a filter, in a way, shaping my experiences and own sense of style. And if I have realised that mixed cultures offer a great richness, it is only because it’s also been a real challenge,
Aesthetica 77
78 Aesthetica
Namsa Leuba, Tiare (2019). Courtesy of the artist.
“I present a reality of sorts, but my photos are not the reality. I create docu-fiction by making a kind of cultural syncretism. I blur the lines and make something unique. I hope that my images allow each viewer to bring their own interpretation to the table.”
Previous Page: Namsa Leuba, Untitled I, Cocktail (2011). Courtesy of the artist. Left: Namsa Leuba, Untitled IV, Cocktail (2011). Courtesy of the artist.
having always made me feel different. That’s maybe why I try to portray a certain level of visual abundance in my images – conveying divergence and multiplicity. In a sense, I need to both enlighten, and be enlightened, to how we evolve in life, and embrace the ways we are “mixed.” I hope that my work participates in this conversation. I engage with the many artists that have come before me and contribute to a wider dialogue about the beauty that can be found across multiple heritages – with their blending of values and philosophies.
beliefs and identity? Is this a reciprocal process? NL: I present a reality of sorts, but my photos are not the reality. I create docu-fiction by making a kind of cultural syncretism. I blur the lines and make something unique. I hope that my images allow each viewer to bring their own personal reading and interpretation to the table, supporting, encouraging and developing a new state of mind altogether.
A: “Codes” are also integral to your images, featuring, for example, masks and headdresses which reference A: Beyond the striking visuals and alluring composi- deep-rooted African traditions. How are the styling and tions, which connect signs and symbols, from Union props integral to a sense of storytelling? Jacks to camouflage and Ankara patterns, it seems as NL: I introduce artefacts based on the theme of cosmogony though your images are, essentially, about considering – objects that reference the founding narratives around the the art of “looking” and “seeing” and the distinctions be- creation of gods and the wider cosmos. I like to decontextutween these. Your new photobook, for example, is called alise and recontextualise these objects in another environment, to give them a new life according to my vision. Crossed Looks – why did you select this title? NL: This was taken from my earlier work, called Ya Kala Ben – a series which animates traditional rituals and symbolic A: In turn, you create many of the masks and headdresses statuettes from the culture of Guinea, by recreating them yourself. Why is this level of personal involvement as living creatures in handmade costumes. Ultimately, all important to you in all areas of the composition? my work is focused on the African identity as seen through NL: I love creating, inventing, playing and diverting objects western eyes. Africa is a part of me, but because I grew up – physically making things with different textures, colours in Switzerland, I needed to explore this element of my roots, and lights. I like to experiment with aesthetics and eroticism, and connect it with the other. Crossed Looks, to me, signifies reflecting and ruminating on the essence of creation through how we can join these two worlds by the positive ways in the lens. This, by definition, has always moved me, and can be seen, perhaps most prominently, in the Cocktail series, which which we look, and perceive, one another. includes both western and tribal-influenced headdresses. A: How far do you feel that photography, in essence, is They feature a number of different plants, including lilies, about challenging our own sense of visual literacy – as which are largely grown across Europe, and Bird of Paradise – we interpret the images in front of us in the context of our or Strelitzia – which is a flower native to South Africa.
Aesthetica 79
Namsa Leuba, L'Attraction (2019). Courtesy of the artist.
A: You engage in various modes of documentary, fashion the body, soul and land. Gauguin’s paintings in French Right: Namsa Leuba, Untitled II, Cocktail (2011). and performance. In these blurred genres and formats, Polynesia were influential in developing the Primitivist art Courtesy of the artist. a range of myths and archetypes recur often. To what movement, which then articulated a visualisation of the extent do you feel you’re portraying something “real” or “other” through a connectivity to nature. Colour, for me, is a means of further subverting and questioning. Each palette is “fictional”? Do these distinctions matter? NL: All my work revolves around identity – making the imbued with certain messages and connotations. invisible visible. I depict a potential reality and dare the viewer to develop their own vision and share it. Ultimately, A: How far do you feel Crossed Looks comes at a crucial moment in time as the western world undergoes a our entire sense of reality is all about our perceptions. dramatic reckoning with oppression and systemic racism? A: Colour and pattern are also prominent across the NL: The world is, still, so utterly divided. We’re currently breadth of your work – from studio portraits to in-situ developing new and necessary conversations around wellshots. Each composition includes a number of hues, being and basic human rights, but these are being offered from dark, rich tones to light, pastel palettes. Many of in the context of many wars, conflicts, modes of oppression the models are, themselves, painted, either with details and misinformation. I think this is why it’s so important on their face or across their whole body. How would you to develop equality between races but also between all define your relationship with colour and what role does continents. By showing and talking about hybridity, it enables us to consider the dangers of segregation. This book it play in the construction of an image? NL: Usually, I am inspired by the colours that we find is about passion and emotion, but is also about offering new everywhere in Africa – on the markets, in fabrics and possibilities towards gender exploration and identity. Times paintings etc. Mostly, though, it’s important for me that I use are, indeed, changing, and we need to awaken our senses colour to illustrate a particular space and time. For example, and consciences to ourselves and each other. in the Illusions series, created in Tahiti, I was inspired by the paintings of Paul Gauguin and “tropical” visual semantics A: Given that your practice is largely built on the pillars Words that have occupied the western collective unconscious. This of self-expression, acceptance and fluidity, is there Kate Simpson type of imagery has, in the past, cast Polynesian woman as a particular message that you'd like to share with our beautiful, desirable and subservient, connected to the natural readers? How can we evolve through the ways we "look"? environment. This myth of the “vahine” – as Polynesian NL: Open your mind, try new things, create your identity Crossed Looks women are referred to – is historically rooted in the west’s and share it widely with the world. Do it again, and again and is published by Damiani search for the “original” and “authentic,” which was thought again. Allow yourself to be continually reborn in this way. to be found in faraway cultures, with a connection between Be open to that which helps us to persist – in art and in life. damianieditore.com
80 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 81
art
Piecing it Together Karen Navarro
Karen Navarro’s (b. 1990) El Pertenecer en Tiempos Modernos (Belonging in Modern Times) series is instantly captivating. Laser-cut embossed archival inkjet prints – cast in bubblegum pink and pillar box red – split models’ faces into concentric circles, vertical strips and checker board tiles. This aesthetic is typical for the Argentine-born, Houston-based artist, who pushes the boundaries and dimensions of images across surreal planes of distortion and obfuscation. Navarro calls upon photography, collage and sculpture to investigate the concepts of race, gender and belonging, as well as how they converge. She notes: “At once colourful, surreal and minimal, my constructed portraits invite the viewer to challenge their own perceptions and biases by highlighting the complexities that make up who we are. Identity is a social construct. Like a puzzle, the various elements of our personhood intersect, coming together to create a pluralistic sense of self.” karennavarroph.com.
Karen Navarro, Subject #8 (2019). Archival Inkjet Print, 18 x 14 in.
82 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 83
Karen Navarro, Subject #14 (2019). Archival Inkjet Print, 18 x 14 in.
84 Aesthetica
Karen Navarro, Subject #6 (2019). Archival Inkjet Print, 18 x 14 in.
Aesthetica 85
Karen Navarro, Subject #13 (2019). Archival Inkjet Print, 18 x 14 in.
86 Aesthetica
Karen Navarro, Subject #12 (2019). Laser-cut embossed archival inkjet print, 18 x 14 in.
Aesthetica 87
Karen Navarro, Subject #15 (2019). Archival Inkjet Print, 18 x 14 in.
88 Aesthetica
Karen Navarro, Subject #2 Variation 1 (2019). Archival Inkjet Print, 18 x 14 in.
Aesthetica 89
Karen Navarro, Subject #3 Variation 1 (2019). Laser-cut embossed archival inkjet print,18 x 14 in.
90 Aesthetica
Karen Navarro, Subject #5 (2019). Laser-cut embossed archival inkjet print, 18 x 14 in.
Aesthetica 91
art
Modes of Fabrication The Constructed Image ARTISTS HAVE LONG SOUGHT INSPIRATION IN FOUND PHOTOS. WE CONSIDER THE ETHICAL AND AESTHETIC IMPLICATIONS OF COLLAGE IN AN AGE OF VISUAL ABUNDANCE.
On an unspecified date in the 1960s, a young woman posed for a pin-up shot. Little did she know that decades later she would make an appearance in an artwork by Swedish artist Eva Stenram (b. 1976). If she were to see the image today, she might not even recognise herself. Only the legs are shown, one foot raised up, the other from the knee down, behind a white blind. In the original, the woman’s body features in full amidst the soft furnishings of a domestic interior. In the new version, Stenram has switched foreground and background, digitally extending the blind to obscure most of the figure – shifting the meaning entirely. It wasn’t a camera but the discovery of Photoshop in the late 1990s that sparked Stenram’s interest in photography. “I was fascinated by the ease in which I could mix different pictures together, causing folds in both space and time,” she recalls. Stenram is amongst a wave of contemporary practitioners who, instead of capturing the world through their own lens, intervene in existing pictures, which they reuse and recompose. She features alongside 18 other artists in the group exhibition The Constructed Image, at The Ravestijn Gallery, Amsterdam. Jasper Bode, the gallery’s Director, developed the theme after noticing that several of his artists, including Inez & Vinoodh, Ruth van Beek and Koen Hauser, used fragmentary techniques, both analogue and digital. “I’ve always been interested in collage because you can push the hyperreality of what you’re looking at,” Bode says. “It lets you do things that in reality you can’t do.” Still, artistic slicing and splicing isn’t new. It can be traced back to the early 20th century when Georges Braque (1882-
92 Aesthetica
1963) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) coined the term “collage” from the French verb coller, to stick or to glue. Cubist collage – using newspaper clippings and other materials – comprised a playful repurposing of found objects. The Surrealists, intrigued by psychoanalysis and dream theory, also used collage, much like automatic writing, to tap into the unconscious, unleashing meaningful juxtapositions between apparently unconnected elements. For the pioneers of photomontage, Dadaists such as Hannah Höch (1889-1978) and John Heartfield (1891-1968), it was a weapon of dissent. Höch deconstructed the sexism of the Weimar Republic from a female perspective, whilst Heartfield developed explicitly anti-fascist art by merging media cut-outs of Nazi politicians – a mantle carried forward into the 21st century by anti-war artist Peter Kennard or satirists like Cold War Steve. Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) declared that “photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores – starting with family portraits.” More than this, though, once there was a technological means to manufacture faithful representations of reality, painters were no longer compelled by likeness and, from the early 20th century onwards, veered into various forms of abstraction. Similarly, now that everyone can take decent snaps with a smartphone in their pocket, fine art photography has a newfound role to play. The borders have, if not dissolved, become more porous – democratised. In a 2016 article for the European Society for the History of Photography, titled Expanded Photography: Persistence of the Photographic, art historian Lucy Soutter described how the medium has transcended the
Aesthetica 93
94 Aesthetica
Drape (Centerfold II), 2012 © Eva Stenram / courtesy The Ravestijn Gallery.
“Copyright ownership remains with the photographer even when posted on social media sites. However, by uploading a picture, you often unwittingly assign the right to the platform, to use it as it wishes.”
Previous Page: Figure in Sofa, 2020 © KYoung / courtesy The Ravestijn Gallery. Left: Drape (Colour I), 2011 © Eva Stenram / courtesy The Ravestijn Gallery.
frame, unfolding into three dimensions. Even as it brings in elements of sculpture, performance, architecture and installation, “expanded photography” retains an interest in the particular currency and history of still photography. This is what makes it a genre of its own, not simply contemporary art that happens to use photography. As KYoung, another participant in The Ravestijn show puts it: “There is an inherent ‘truth’ within the photographic source material; it lends credibility and contributes to a suspension of disbelief, making it an invaluable tool. [From the start] my interventions allowed me to tell something beyond a single moment in space and time; it was a new way of thinking about image-making.” In particular, the past decade or so has seen a resurgence of interest in photomontage and collage, with a flourishing in new variations of the form amongst contemporary practitioners. Julie Cockburn (b. 1966) who takes archival prints of portraits and embellishes them with embroidery and collage, transforming each one into a unique art object, is one example. Another is John Stezaker (b. 1949), whose surreal combinations of found film stills and publicity portraits won him the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2012, a decision deemed problematic for some purists who disagreed that such a prominent award should go to someone who didn’t himself “take” the pictures. These strategies are forms of manipulation, whilst not intended, necessarily, to deceive. This differentiates them from the murky world of deepfakes and filters, although they inevitably tap into those themes in the ways that they reassemble and reconceive. The audience is savvy, still, in knowing that what they are witnessing is an alteration, or at least they should be, conceptually. “Unfortunately, the context sometimes gets
lost, as the works spread,” says Eva Stenram. “A lot of people have assumed that I photograph models behind drapes. For me this would be totally uninteresting. The process itself – changing the picture by covering a model that used to be visible with the drape that used to be in the background – is for me what makes the piece intriguing and complex.” Stenram, who cites artists Man Ray, Claude Cahun, Brassaï and Hans Bellmer as abiding influences, identifies with the Surrealist idea of “disrupting reality from within.” For her, the act of modifying the vintage pin-ups reveals the voyeurism at play in the original. “I investigate how we look – by diverting the viewer’s gaze, removing the overt sexual content and playing around with the hierarchies within them.” Reusing portraiture invokes specific ethical problems in relation to the subject of the original shot. Who were they? Does it matter? Are artists indebted to them? These are questions that Eva Stenram has considered at length. For Drape, she trawled online auction sites to procure the negatives of shots intended for publication in American men’s magazines. “It is not clear if they were ever published, where they were taken, or who the model and photographer were. I deliberately choose examples with minimal information. It is important to not know too much about their history,” she says. “I always attempt to make the original models anonymous. I don’t want my pictures to be about anyone specifically – this is about women, sexuality, photography and looking generally, not the models as individuals.” This is an important distinction to make. In a sense, we’re all models now. Before the advent of the internet, we had greater control of the self we projected in public. Now screens are an ever-present fact of everyday life, we have become
Aesthetica 95
L.A., 2012, © Martina Sauter / courtesy The Ravestijn Gallery.
accustomed to seeing our faces projected online on Zoom regarded as infringement.” KYoung outlines how this plays or Facebook. Our representations have become slippery out in their work: “An obligation for sensitivity remains things, no longer in our grasp, as they circulate on social imperative when reusing found material. And, irrespective of media. CCTV cameras around cities, outside shops, even on the time-span between when the source imagery was made smart home tech such as doorbells, capture us on a daily and then reused, as defined in copyright law, collage should basis. Our faces have become something, truly, other than only ever borrow, not steal, from the material it reimagines.” And yet, KYoung also stresses, collage artists are engaging our own and that's something we all have to come to terms with in the years ahead. Whilst this isn’t necessarily the focus with something unique to our time. “It is fair, even essential, of artists such as those in The Ravestijn Gallery show, many for artists to acknowledge the saturation of photographs of whom, like Stenram, are extremely conscious of how they that we encounter in everyday modern life.” According to use archival portraiture, it serves to remind us that our own analysis by Keypoint Intelligence over 1.43 trillion were taken in 2020 alone, 90% of them using smartphones. “And likeness exists in a realm way beyond our consent. There are legal, as well as ethical, implications in the ques- the act of reusing them within artworks is fundamental to tion of ownership. Broadly speaking, the person who takes a identifying, documenting and exploring the social constructs photograph is its copyright owner, although in some cases, surrounding where they sit within a particular time frame. this could be transferred to an institution such as an archive Their inclusion in art serves as a future reference point. We or library. Copyright ownership remains with the photogra- only have to look back at Hannah Höch and John Heartfield pher even when posted on social media sites. However, by to see just how important it will be in retrospect.” Just as Höch and Heartfield questioned the social situation uploading a picture, you often unwittingly assign the right to the platform, be it Instagram or Facebook, to use it as it of their era, so many of these artists raise incisive points wishes. For example, by signing Twitter’s – probably rarely about our political reality. KYoung chooses not to disclose read – terms and conditions, you agree to let them “use, their gender identity “for the sake of impartiality.” One way copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, of understanding their work is that it reflects new ideas about gender where predetermined, binary norms are rejected in display and distribute” your photographs and posts. This is problematic for professionals, who take a risk every favour of the right to define one’s own identity, mixing and time they share their work, although when it comes to artistic matching elements that feel right. It’s an approach that’s appropriation, the UK government has specific protections. also well suited to an age in which our survival requires us Their website states that, “it is not necessary that a work is to reimagine what we have, instead of churning out more. copied in its entirety – copying a ‘substantial’ part will also We could think of this as a form of upcycling. In another 70 infringe … the courts tend to interpret the term ‘substantial years’ time, who knows where that 1960s pin up may be. The part’ broadly, so even taking a relatively small part can be story of an image is never complete, its legacy forever in flux.
96 Aesthetica
Right: Green Curtains with Rug, 2020 © KYoung / courtesy The Ravestijn Gallery.
Words Rachel Segal Hamilton
The Constructed Image The Ravestijn Gallery, Amsterdam Until 4 September theravestijngallery.com
Aesthetica 97
art
Complex Narratives The Next Generation
Photographs, by nature, relay information for the viewer, but what happens to the truth in the process? How important is it that we maintain a sense of reality, or should we try to further remove ourselves from it? If the pursuit is documentary focused, how can the photographer ensure an accurate representation of the subject? Moreover, can we ever create images devoid of an agenda or specific intention? And when is it our story to tell? As part of Aesthetica’s ongoing collaboration with London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, we select 10 talented photographers who work with these challenging questions. This compelling selection of images focuses on aspects of privacy and intimacy, holding the viewer’s gaze through moments of intervention and interruption. We are invited into deeply personal spaces, and asked to consider the implication of our presence, whether we're up close or far away. arts.ac.uk/lcc.
Lina Geoushy, A Man With His Daughter, 2021, Cairo, Egypt.
98 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 99
Liliia Kucher, Landscape with reeds from the book Why is it blue? (2021).
100 Aesthetica
Laura Gaggero, Isadora (2020).
Aesthetica 101
Siqi Li, Bird Walking (2020).
102 Aesthetica
Giulia Grillo, Take Me Back (2020).
Aesthetica 103
Lauren Hillsdon, Dalkeith (2021).
104 Aesthetica
Lauren Hillsdon, Dalkeith (2021).
Aesthetica 105
Carmen Reichman, Box Trees and Folk Devils (2021).
106 Aesthetica
Sophie Holden, Eventide (2021),
Aesthetica 107
Minjie LV, Routine (Still, 2020).
108 Aesthetica
Sirui Ma,Sunset (2019).
Aesthetica 109
art
Across the Nation Jamie Hawkesworth HAWKESWORTH’S LATEST PROJECT, SHOT OVER 13 YEARS, OFFERS A GLIMPSE OF BRITAIN AND ITS DIVERSITY, A CELEBRATION OF PHOTOGRAPHY WITHOUT BORDERS.
“I got to the point where I had to stop myself. I’d get off the returning to Preston for a month to take pictures in the town’s train in a lot of places and I’d have only got 100 yards before bus station, a series printed as a zine by Preston is My Paris stopping every single person [to photograph them]. I was like in 2009. This zine helped Hawkesworth acquire a first agent, ‘Jamie you need to chill out and actually explore!’” This is and it is now considered a classic; in 2019, Dashwood Books Suffolk-born Jamie Hawkesworth (b. 1987), discussing the published it as part of a 10-year anniversary monograph. By 2012, he had been offered the first large-scale inception of The British Isles, a collection of images taken across the UK, which combines portraits with observational commission, documenting potato pickers in Sweden for The New York Times; by 2013 he was shooting JW Anderson’s shots, landscapes and quirky, incidental details. The photographs were taken between 2007 and 2020, a tu- Autumn/Winter collection. His career in fashion photography multuous period in British history, which included the credit has been stellar ever since, including a long relationship with crunch, riots, Brexit and the accelerated Black Lives Matter Miu Miu, Loewe and Alexander McQueen, plus titles such movement. It’s an era that probed Britishness and national as British Vogue, The Gentlewoman and Man About Town. identity, eventually coming under intense debate, though His fashion images draw on the documentary rather than the images were never intended as a comment on Britain. If glamour or elaborate sets, and have often involved streetanything, they were quite the opposite, shot on hundreds of cast models. Hawkesworth has also continued to shoot trips without a grand project in mind – just the simple desire documentary work all along, and established a credible to travel and see places for what they were. The works don’t fine art career, exhibiting in venues such as Huis Marseille in visibly pick up on the epoch-changing shifts of this time, in- Amsterdam, Red Hook Labs in Brooklyn, Taka Ishii Gallery in stead taking a much gentler look at intimate moments from Tokyo, and The Hepworth Wakefield in the UK. everyday life. A boy eats a cupcake, an older lady is snap- “Sometimes I wondered how people saw me as a fashion pily dressed at a train station, a faint rainbow breaks across a photographer when I have done so much more about people cloudy sky. “I was never thinking about Britain in that wider and places,” he states, and The British Isles is demonstrative of this in action. All the images are personal – with only a sense,” he notes. “It was so much simpler than that.” Hawkesworth initially majored in forensic science at the couple of exceptions – dating right back to early experiments, University of Central Lancashire, before stumbling into such as three monochrome portraits of boys on the way photography in 2007 via a class on documenting crime into college. This sense of movement is key; Hawkesworth scenes. He immediately fell for the medium and changed would often simply turn up at the railway station and pick courses, graduating in 2009 before moving to London. Here, a destination anywhere that sounded interesting, or was he picked up assisting work but kept on with personal projects, unfamiliar, and headed there with a camera. There were also
110 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 111
112 Aesthetica
Jamie Hawkesworth. Image from The British Isles (MACK, 2021). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.
“If there was no one, he’d feel dejected, but then ultimately someone else would appear, with a loaf of bread sweating in the sunshine in cellophane, perhaps, or a puddle, or a pram loaded with candy floss.”
Previous Page: Jamie Hawkesworth. Image from The British Isles (MACK, 2021). Courtesy of the artist and MACK. Left: Jamie Hawkesworth. Image from The British Isles (MACK, 2021). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.
many more planned trips, such as a journey up to Unst – the northernmost of the inhabited British Isles – which required a train, a ferry, another ferry, another train and an hour-long walk. “That was a real moment of thinking ‘God I’m really on my own here, what am I doing?” he laughs, though adds that this was the setting for a particularly memorable portrait that made it into The British Isles – a composition of a girl in a pink tracksuit. The piece became an affirmation, representing a re-commitment to personal work and solo trips. These travels were, truly, journeys of discovery that involved just walking and seeing who was available. If there was no one, he’d feel dejected, but then ultimately someone else would appear, with a loaf of bread sweating in the sunshine in cellophane, perhaps, or a puddle, or a pram loaded with candy floss. “I’d see something unimaginable. You couldn’t sit down and go ‘Oh OK, today I’m going to photograph some candy floss.’ That kind of surprise always made me feel like my battery had been recharged.” It is here that we reference Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “Decisive Moment” – in which the image represents the essence of the moment itself. In this way, Hawkesworth works intuitively – spontaneously – and doesn’t know what initially attracts him to a certain person or perspective. Though, in retrospect, he admits to being drawn to the colour red, or scenes in which one colour dominates the composition. There’s a shot of a red bench at a railway station, for example, its rich colour picked out by a shaft of sunlight. Elsewhere, three girls are photographed from behind, the image dominated by soft blues and whites. The British Isles, as a whole, demonstrates a keen eye for the way the light falls – one image, for example, brought to life by the way the sun hits the tall grass, or the side of a building.
Beyond colour, the compositions in The British Isles are invariably diverse, but the project wasn’t conceived as a “mission” to paint a picture of a multicultural Britain, rather, it’s just what the photographer found on the road. It is, in this way, authentically representative, offering a democratic view of the UK whereby no one individual takes precedence. Hawkesworth’s method, widely lauded, is also, automatic and instinctive, rather than habitual. No two images are shot in the same way (though are mostly shot on a Mamiya RB67 medium format camera on tripod, and occasionally a handheld Pentax). The pictures sometimes show people head-on, others in the distance, from behind, or only partly in view. And, if an individual was going to be recognisable, they were always asked for their permission first. Sometimes it was a yes; sometimes a no, but either way they usually wanted to get on with their day pretty quickly afterwards, and “not stand around talking to the weird guy with the camera.” Even so, the compositions paint a singularly rosy view of the subjects, and by extension the geography of Britain, partly because of the way they’re printed. Hawkesworth prints all his own work, and tends to “warm up” the colours. It makes the images disarmingly easy to like, and started back when with the Preston Bus Station project, because it was cold and he wanted to create something optimistic, helping the campaign to save the then-threatened Brutalist building. If anything, he mentions having to “chill out on the warmth,” because the pieces were starting to be more about the printing than the subject. And whilst it’s clear that everyone is being shown in a favourable light, the photographer explains that this is also about a love of image-making, not Britain or national identity necessarily. “I was very conscious that I
Aesthetica 113
Jamie Hawkesworth. Image from The British Isles (MACK, 2021). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.
always wanted them to feel like little celebrations. It wouldn’t have made sense to take a picture of someone looking bad.” Even with all these hundreds of shots, many of them went unseen for years. It wasn’t until the first Covid lockdown that there was finally time to look through the archive, to print and pin the results on the wall opposite a darkroom, where “slowly the faces built up.” After about a year, there were 500 portraits. At that point a project “started to take shape,” and the challenge became trying to finish it, or find a natural stopping point, as there didn’t seem to be one. Some of the closing images were taken for British Vogue, showing train driver Narguis Horsford, ward sister Eunice Ouko and shopkeeper Jatin Patel and family. These key workers kept going throughout the first lockdown, and so they were included because they felt so important. Even still, he is quick to fend off the idea of presenting “everyday heroes” or suggest that any one person is special over another. For the same reason, the The British Isles proved difficult to sequence, so it meant turning to a few trusted advisors for help, including the publisher Michael Mack and friend Nigel Shafran, another great photographer of everyday British life. The first edit was chronological but “just didn’t work” – so he decided to change tack altogether. The finished title presents the works as if they were part of a voyage, mixing wildly disparate people with the occasional flash of a great view or some “banal but brilliant” detail. The curation also has much to do with ambiguity and equivocacy, in that it’s very difficult to tell when each picture was taken. “Time just kind of goes backwards and forwards [in The British Isles],” he says. It’s an approach that takes the series away from being a straight documentary or a story about a particular time and
114 Aesthetica
place, though of course it still records something about both. And, now that the book has been published, questions of identity, nationhood and belonging are finally being put under the spotlight, amidst outright racism against players in England’s Euro 2020 squad. It is for these reasons that the publication will no doubt endure throughout the 21st century, and be studied as a time capsule from when the UK started to truly reckon with its systemic inequality. It’s interesting that these discussions are so prominent, and that the book is being interpreted in this way, because from the photographer’s perspective it just happens to have been shot in the UK because he happens to be British, and happens to live here. However, he has undoubtedly captured a diverse and beautiful population, drawing from the techniques used in forensics – focusing on direct details, both large and small, and the context as it appears, as opposed to pursuing a sense of “emotional truth.” It’s here that the work raises incredibly poignant questions about the role of the documentarian today, and whether they can truly capture life as it is, rather than how they think it is – completely devoid of agenda. Furthermore, what role does the viewer have, and how do they impress their own perspectives back onto the images? Moving forward, he’s now working on a new book, which will gather pictures from all over the world, mixing locations in a kind of free-moving democracy. He concludes: “I want to do something similar, but it won’t be separated by continent. On the same spread you might move from Sweden to Beijing. There will be no borders, no countries, just people living there and the journey.” In Hawkesworth's world, we are all one and the same – impartially and passively – and this is perhaps why The British Isles is the perfect antidote right now.
Right: Jamie Hawkesworth. Image from The British Isles (MACK, 2021). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.
Words Diane Smyth
The British Isles is published by MACK Books jamiehawkesworth.co.uk mackbooks.co.uk
Aesthetica 115
art
Ones to Watch NEW AND NOTEWORTHY
The 2021 graduates from Buckinghamshire New University are working across the fields of fine art, textiles, prosthetics, graphic and product design. These talented individuals engage with some of the most pressing issues of our time, from sustainable production to equal representation. Our selection includes 12 bold and exciting voices, from sculptors using smoke as a medium to fashion designers tapping into the multicultural history of tartan.
1
Emma Duhig Rosemary Collage / Rocky Forms
@edprintdesigns The pandemic has altered everything. One such change is for people to take their holidays in the UK. It was all too commonplace to jump on a cheap flight and go somewhere in the south of France or Spain. However, Emma Duhig has embraced nature found at local seasides in her recent works. She wanted to capture the beauty of the British coast with a focus on textiles for home interiors after spending so much time inside during the three lockdowns. Her project uses natural colour, materials and motifs that intertwine biophilic design principles, and materials that are aesthetically pleasing but also that have health benefits. Sustainability is at the heart of Duhig's craft, realised through using fabric and screen printing onto wood.
2
Sylvie Baka
African Influences in Western Fashion
@stonebaka Sylvie Baka’s work is inspired by three African materials: Ghana bags, raffia and beads. She undertook extensive research to understand when these fabrics were first introduced into western design and manufacturing. There is evidence of these three materials dating back to the 17th century, and this discovery formed the basis of her collection. Baka designed six garments using knitting, embroidery and beading techniques. Tartan, which comprises crisscrossed horizontal and vertical bands in multiple colours, is the core interconnection between African and western fashion influences. It has been associated with several cultures, including Scottish, Irish, Indian, Caribbean and African, particularly the DR Congo and Ghana.
3
2
Caitlin Martin In Good Health – Peasy
@caitlinmartinnnn In an interview with Aesthetica, Emily King, curator of the 13th Beazley Designs of the Year Awards, noted: “From my point of view, design is everything. It can be information, or a set of dance steps; it can even be a protocol or set of behaviours. It can be the basis of how we deal with urgent issues.” Caitlin Martin embraces these ideas, with a focus on functionality and the consumer. For Martin’s final project, she produced the branding for a healthy fast-food delivery service, tackling the aesthetics of the junk food industry. She states: “The challenge of creating positive communication is what drives me. Design can be a hugely powerful tool for change, and it has an undeniable impact on those who come into contact with it.”
4
Sarah Creasey Blood Moon
@sarah.bear29 Exploration and the opportunity to experiment are a fundamental part of developing a creative practice. Innovation and idea generation are the foundation of any artistic process. As an illustrator, Sarah Creasey combined a range of physical procedures, such as painting and collage, plus working with digital software programmes such as Adobe and Procreate. The world around us is fertile ground for developing projects and some of today’s most pressing topics, including environmental issues, mental health and body positivity, form part of her portfolio. Editorial projects have been a source of great enjoyment, and Creasey has collaborated and designed a range of publications as part of a larger portfolio of work.
116 Aesthetica
4
1a
3
1b
Aesthetica 117
5a
6
7
5b
118 Aesthetica
8
5
Robyn West
The Non-Conformist
@robynwest_art Robyn West’s practice spans a period of four decades, exploring the ramifications of the fashion industry and vanity sizing as part of an ongoing cultural investigation. As a way of combatting the negative ramifications of a size-zero-obsessed culture – with unrealistic expectations for women in particular – West learnt dressmaking in her teens as a necessity. This experience is evident in recent explorations of the human body. Her research has included looking into the history of clothing sizes, the classifications of body shapes and the idealisation of the female form. West has produced a series of experiments with texture, shape and line, finding liberation in the process itself. She has re-interpreted the traditional practice of dressmaking, employing new materials and processes to re-write history and offer a new perspective on the ways in which we clothe, adorn and present ourselves to the world.
6
Niamh Warren
7
Isabella Inga
Untitled
@mushroomcrouton “Incense has a strong connection to relaxation throughout history, whereas smoke is often tied to a sense of danger and corruption, and we are forced to look for the start of the fire. I found myself drawn to smoke due to its expressive and elusive nature.” As Niamh Warren notes, her final project is a sculpture, which centres on the human feelings of fear and discomfort – conjuring alarm bells in the mind and the fight-or-flight instinct. In a culture of pain avoidance, what value is there in feeling uncomfortable? What can it tell us about ourselves and the materiality of our existence? How far should we push ourselves as artists? Warren continues: “A side effect of the entire process includes getting smoke in my eyes repeatedly and experiencing dull headaches that lasted long after each experiment. I want my audiences to feel something similar upon viewing the piece – to feel disconcerted and unnerved.”
Patience
@isabellaingaart Art has an unparalleled power to trigger emotions and connect with our sense of humanity. Each viewer brings their own context to the work and vice versa, creating boundless potential for nuance and innate understanding. Isabella Inga considers the concept of emotional contagion – how empathetic responses can be generated through artwork, and specifically, through painting. Her canvasses are bold and expressive, questioning how feelings are translated through the movement of colour and form, and emphasising the answers. In doing so, Inga considers complex concepts about the role of the artist, especially in an age of limited in-person interaction. How do people respond to the final product? How important is the end result? How much value lies in the development of a piece? Ultimately, she questions how long her presence can be felt, or seen, in a painting long after it’s been considered finished.
8
Laura Jane Sessions Medusa's Voice
@eyeslikepandas Sessions's portfolio is built around archetypal representations of women, using prosthetics and sculpture to see how these depictions feed into today’s culture of violence and assault. Sessions is interested, particularly, in the figure of Medusa, and her origin story, before becoming a widely accepted villain. She notes: “In Ovid’s telling of Medusa, a priestess is raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple. Rather than challenge Poseidon (a powerful male rival), Athena blames Medusa and curses her with a head of snakes. In my representation, parallels are drawn with contemporary rape victims, who continue to be blamed for the sexual violence perpetrated on them. Medusa wears plain priestess robes with snakes close in colour to her hair. She has subtle scars from the assault and evidence of self-harming to her right arm. Her back story is just as relevant today as it was in the times of classical antiquity.”
1a. Emma Duhig, Rosemary collage (2021). Paper collage, 297mm x 210mm. 1b. Emma Duhig, Rocky forms (2021). Screen print onto pallet wood, 297mm x 210mm. 2. Sylvie Baka, African Influences in Western Fashion (2021). Ghana bags, raffia, beads. 3. Caitlin Martin, In Good Health - Peasy, Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop, 2021. 4. Sarah Creasey, Blood Moon - Making Periods Sustainable (2021). 120gsm premium card stock. 5a. Robyn West, The Non-conformist (2021). Tissue paper patterns, card, glue, brass fasteners. 86cm x 70cm x 74cm. 5b. Robyn West, The Non-conformist (2021). Tissue paper patterns, card, glue, brass fasteners. 86cm x 70cm x 74cm. 6. Niamh Warren, Untitled (2021). Linen, String, Teabags and Light.
Aesthetica 119
9
Zeena Morris Progression / Living Coral
@Zeenamorrisxdesigns Mixed-media and fibre art are the starting point for any piece made by Zeena Morris. Detailed research is undertaken to explore new techniques. To date, collage, tufting and felting have been a great source of inspiration for developing new ideas and creations. Her latest discovery is how tufting and traditional stitching can bring a wider sense of texture and movement to unique designs. Bright colours and details from the surrounding landscape are a starting point for any project. Sustainability, too, plays a key role, from the inception of an idea to its delivery. It is never an afterthought, and Morris is keen to use her textiles to bring about a wider awareness of the climate crisis and the overarching responsibility the fashion industry has to integrate more ethical practices into clothing production. Her final collection looks towards the oceans and the impact that bleaching is having on coral and sea life.
10
Rhiannon Campbell JUNO
@rhi_designs_ Rhiannon Campbell makes work that empowers audiences to make positive change in their lives. Thorough and focused research underpins the work, and she is passionate about human rights. Female genital cutting (FGC) is the starting point for this project. FGC encompasses all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injuries to the female genital organs. It is recognised globally as a violation of the human rights of girls and women. It reflects a deep-rooted inequality and discrimination against women. In the UK alone, currently, 137,000 women are living with FGC. To tackle this, she created Juno. It is a sanitary box subscription brand that collaborates with brands such as Lush Cosmetics and Graze to contribute their most popular products to the monthly boxes. Juno donates 25% of sales to the UK based FORWARD Foundation to fight against FGC.
11
9a
Abigail Hawkes Interconnected Questions
@abbiehawkesdesign How important is book design? In June 2020, BBC Culture set out to answer that question, noting that “covers can be a swift way to signal genre, but the good ones do more than that. They give face to a book’s personality. They’re what will make you pick it up in the first place, then keep it on your shelf to remind you what it meant to you.” These are the questions at the heart of Abigail Hawkes's final project, producing a form of advertising for a young adult crime fiction novel, This Lie Will Kill You (Chelsea Pitcher, 2018). She explains: “I had no preconceptions about the book, or any of the work I might produce. Throughout the course of the project, I made notes about the main setting, the scene of the crime and the title. Researching typography, colour and layouts helped me make judgements about what would communicate the overall genre of crime fiction and reflect the book’s story line accurately.”
12
9b
Saadia Shiekh
The Next Phase
@saadiashiekh Disability is not synonymous with inability. Disabilities come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and they can necessitate special clothing requirements such as a certain size and fit or alternate closures. However, much of the apparel made for people with disabilities is practical and functional, leaving the style aspect aside. Shiekh’s interest lies in designing and creating concepts that are progressive and unconventional at the same time, subverting the status quo by producing clothing that could support people with or without diverse needs. To put it simply, the designs can be worn by all body types. She employed “subtracting cutting,” which uses the negative space in the fabric unearthing experimental and unexpected discoveries in the pieces. New closures ideas, such as, magnets as buttons, large snaps, chunky zipper details were kept in mind, in order to imbed accessibility for diverse bodies into the garments.
7. Isabella Inga, Patience (2021). Acrylic paint on wood, 2.5m x 1.4m. 8. Laura Jane Sessions, Medusa's Voice. Acrylic adhesive piece (pro-bondo) on human body, 20cm x 6cm. 9a. Zeena Morris, Progression (2021). Hand tufting, Beading and Fringing. 60 cm x 45 cm. 9b. Zeena Morris, Living Coral (2021). Hand Tufting, Felting, Beading, Tubing and Hand stitching. 100cm x 100cm. 10. Rhiannon Campbell, JUNO (2021). 11. Abigail Hawkes, Interconnected Questions (2021). Ink, acrylic, fine liner, marker and digital. 12. Saadia Shiekh, The Next Phase (2021). Repurposed Silk Hijabs.
120 Aesthetica
10
12
11
Aesthetica 121
reviews
Exhibition Reviews
1
Blue Violet CIG HARVEY
When a sick friend began gradually losing her senses, she asked Cig Harvey (b. 1973) to send her new photographs everyday. The resulting body of work is an explosion of colour that references and engages all five basic components of our sensory experience. A monograph – her fourth – further eternalises these temporal experiences in a series of botanical prints imbued with history and poetry. Although the images predominantly feature flowers, they are not about blooms, but rather, evoke life, death and everything in between. Harvey uses her subject to penetrate viewers’ subconscious and make her mark. In Cleaver and Petals (2020), chopped petals stain a white plastic cutting block and fabric in deep pink hues, a tender fragility disrupted by the large blade held by a young person’s hand. The aura is distinctively ominous, like the scene of a crime
that just happened, but with a blurred sequence of events. Life and death peacefully coexist in Poppies (floating), also shot last year. The red and white petals quietly decay in a very literal take on the nature morte (still life, but literally, “dead nature”) genre. The pistils peering out of Petunias (2020) look like so many eyes blinking in a turbulent dark violet sea. Symbols and metaphors prevail, just like the mysticism of Harvey’s surreal images of family and nature. “I’m trying to somehow come at the world in a slightly different way,” she explained in a recent interview for Elles X Paris Photo. Harvey left the black and white photography of her early years after discovering how colour can heal and foster conversation. Saturated in dye sublimation prints on aluminium, hues become in her hands a tool to draw, intrigue and ultimately impact whoever comes in close enough.
Words Olivia Hampton
Robert Mann, New York 6 May - 20 August robertmann.com
2
Accra / London JAMES BARNOR
In 1967, British-Ghanaian photographer James Barnor (b. 1929) photographed BBC Africa Service presenter Mike Eghan against the backdrop of neon signs at Piccadilly Circus. More than half a century later, this iconic image was the inspiration for Vogue Italia’s April 2021 cover, with Barnor remotely-shooting model Adwoa Aboah. Despite a copious portfolio, Barnor remained unknown in British photographic circles. His first large-scale UK retrospective is now at Serpentine. It covers the 1950s to 1980s, with the transition of two societies: Ghana as it became the first West African country to gain independence from the British, and England as it became vastly more multicultural. Barnor’s practice comprises studio portraiture, photojournalism and social documentary photography. His sitters, whether the Ghanain Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, or
young, anonymous children, have agency, pride – and a certain sense of defiance – reflected back in their gaze. The retrospective also shows Barnor’s impressive trajectory, from opening his first studio Ever Young in Ghana and moving to London in the 1960s, to working with Drum magazine and placing models of African descent on the cover, as well as introducing Ghana to colour photography in the 1970s. The show is an examination of his engagement with, and the impact he had, on the photographic practices in Ghana and London. Barnor left London around 1969, a year after Enoch Powell made his Rivers of Blood speech criticising mass immigration, but returned in 1994. For an artist who was instrumental in giving the African Diaspora space, agency and a chance at self-expression, it’s tragic that it took more than 50 years for Barnor’s contributions to be applauded.
Words Shyama Laxman
Serpentine Galleries, London 19 May - 22 October serpentinegalleries.org
3
Berl-Berl JAKOB KUDSK STEENSEN
Berlin is built on reclaimed wetlands. These swamps are where Jakob Kudsk Steensen (b. 1987) found inspiration for an immersive audio-visual installation. Berl-Berl reconceptualises this endangered ecological system, set inside the brutalist concrete walls of Berlin’s most famed nightclub. The basis of the work includes rigorous fieldwork documenting the swamplands – particularly in the Spreewald region of Berlin-Brandenburg – and items from the collection at Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde. Kudsk Steensen created the piece in the gaming platform Unreal Engine, bridging the realms of scientific reality and virtual imagination. The artist constructed composite three-dimensional images using macro photogrammetry, a technique in which hundreds of photographs are taken of an object – a beetle, or a stalk of grass. Meanwhile, a soundscape, designed in col-
122 Aesthetica
laboration with Matt McCorkle, blends vocals by Venezualan musician Arca with recordings of local wildlife. The exhibition takes its name from the word “berl” – the ancient local term for swamp, informed by the texts of Slavic mythology. The work celebrates the rich variety of wetlands ecology, following a tree’s roots to the fungal system below ground, up to constellations in the night sky, before honing in on a single leaf. Meanwhile, LED screens, arranged across two floors, lead the viewer on a cyclical journey through ecosystems that thrive, decay, die and regenerate. Furthermore, mirrored floors exaggerate a sense of movement. As viewers, we are given the sense of being submerged in the changing landscape that is at once idyllic and barren. Though people are notably absent from Kudsk Steensen’s world, viewers are both literally and metaphorically here in the wetlands.
Words Lily Pollock
Halle am Berghain, Berlin 10 July - 26 September lightartspace.org
1a. Boltonia Asteroides, 2019. © Cig Harvey, Courtesy Robert Mann Gallery. 1b. Emerald Coat with Dahlia Petals, 2019. © Cig Harvey, Courtesy Robert Mann Gallery. 2. James Barnor, c.1971 Sick Hagemeyer shop assistant, Accra. Courtesy Autograph. 3. Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Berl-Berl, 2021. Courtesy the artist.
1a
2 3
1b
Aesthetica 123
4
5b
124 Aesthetica
6
4. Anna Ehrenstein, Thibaut II, 2018, (Detail) © Anna Ehrenstein . Courtesy Office Impart and KOW Berlin. .5a. Max Colson, The Island, 2021. 3D, playable virtual world. Courtesy of the artist and VITRINE. . 5b. Max Colson, The Island, 2021. 3D, playable virtual world. Courtesy of the artist and VITRINE.. 6. Diana Markosian, The Arrival, from Santa Barbara, 2019; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund purchase; © Diana Markosian.
5a
4
Tools for Conviviality ANNA EHRENSTEIN
Anna Ehrenstein (b. 1992), winner of the 2020 C/O Berlin Talent Award, brings together photography, collage, video and sculpture in this vibrant multimedia installation. The project was created in Dakar over the course of numerous physical and virtual visits, and features Saliou Ba, Donkafele, Nyamwathi Gichau, Lydia Likibi and Awa Seck. These creatives are migrants to the Senegalese capital, coming from Benin, Guinea, Gambia, the Republic of Congo and Kenya – and form part of a diaspora community outside of western consciousness. Whilst in C/O Berlin, the photographs are displayed on curved sheets of transparent material, in Dakar they are presented as T-shirts made by Ehrenstein’s collaborators. The decision to co-produce this work with local artists departs from the traditionally detached documentary approach, in favour of a cross-exchange. Ehrenstein’s overtly political project questions our faith in
the idea of a digital utopia. Nonetheless, with their imperfect photoshopped aesthetic, these surreal photographs retain a sense of playfulness. Kaleidoscopic images of bodies folded into yoga positions are presented alongside collages with motifs of hard drives, Virtual Reality headsets and falling bitcoins. A dizzying 360-degree video shows scenes of life in the Senegalese capital: market stalls, fairground rides, people dancing on a rooftop and dressed in tailored suits. Dakar is represented in all its diversity, challenging colonial assumptions that perpetuate a single narrative of Africa. The work, ultimately, is ambitious in scope, touching on a broad range of subjects such as migration, technology, consumerism and globalisation. Instead of idolising innovation, Ehrenstein asks the viewer to reimagine their relationship with the technology, in the hope that we can reclaim the tools of digital communication to further human connection.
Words Lily Pollock
C/O Berlin 29 May - 2 September co-berlin.org
5
The Island MAX COLSON
My head is stuck in a billboard as the disembodied voice of ex-SAS serviceman and celebrity hardman Ant Middleton rallies “the strong and able” against a new threat. The virus is “the equivalent to our shores being breached by an enemy force,” he says. My face begins to meld with a metal strut. It’s unclear how I arrived on this island and there seems no way out. Next to me is a red letterbox, a decommissioned tank, one huge YouTube comment, and discarded masks. Even when Max Colson’s The Island – a playable, 3-D virtual world – glitches, it feels eerily pertinent. Colson’s digital artwork is set in a British pastoral landscape. It is a walking simulator that invites the viewer to explore a collage of contemporary public health announcements, WWII British propaganda and Facebook posts on the subjects of Covid19 and Brexit. There are nine Union Jack flags hidden across the island to collect, and the “game” is played in first-person, perspective, recalling popular shooters like Call of Duty.
The whole experience is superbly disorientating, an uncanny valley of wartime trauma-turned-nostalgia. There is no obvious story to follow, but plenty of humour amongst the media fallout. Colson is mischievous; his copy-andpasted material speaks for itself, immersing us in a genuine experience of post-war hypocrisy that we ironise at our peril. We laugh at Redpilled Tuber’s post invoking his Grandma's stockpile of Fray Bentos as a figure of resilience against nuclear holocaust. “You can fix anything with HP sauce,” he says. Yet, I am caught off guard yet again by a graveyard of Words Uber Eats coolers settled just around the corner. Jack Solloway Ant Middleton was forced to apologise for his cavalier, keep calm and carry on attitude to Coronavirus. Colson interrogates this Blitz Spirit as inherent to the British psyche. Vitrine Gallery, London Here on The Island, a shelled cafe reads “BUSINESS AS 18 June - 5 September USUAL”. It’s true: Britishness is like HP sauce. However, as Colson reminds us poignantly, you can’t live off the stuff. vitrinegallery.com
6
Santa Barbara DIANA MARKOSIAN
When she was just seven years old, Diana Markosian (b. the American dream as portrayed by Hollywood and the 1989) moved to California with her mother and brother. bittersweet realities of the immigrant experience. The project Markosian’s mother, Svetlana, was raising her two children is at the heart of her first solo exhibition, at SFMOMA, and alone in Moscow after her marriage – and the Soviet Union – monograph, published by Aperture. She found actors had collapsed. The Armenian parents had gone from being amongst hundreds who auditioned to play her family as professors to selling their own clothes to make a living whilst part of an elaborate time machine of sorts, working with a screenwriter from the original American show, a set designer the kids picked bottles off the street for cash. Watching the lush, sun-drenched Santa Barbara (1984- and a casting director for three years. Boundaries between 1993), the first American soap opera broadcast on Russian “real” and fictionalised events are unclear in the work, akin to state television, Svetlana imagined a better life for herself. the unsettling accounts in Patrick Modiano’s novels. The mother’s perspective of “coming to nowhere as no She became a mail-order bride at age 35, subsequently moving to America to marry a man 30 years her senior. one” dominates the narrative, as seen through her hopes, It would be another 15 years before Markosian saw her aspirations, disappointment, despair and reconciliation after marrying a man she hardly knew, selling ties in a department biological father again. It's an astounding tale. Santa Barbara is Markosian’s retelling of the saga, walking store despite holding a PhD in economics or learning how in her mother’s footsteps. Film footage, staged images and to drive. Recreated and archival materials merge to form a family photographs probe the deep disconnect between single, deeply personal set of compelling memories.
Words Olivia Hampton
SFMOMA, San Francisco 3 July - 12 December sfmoma.org
Aesthetica 125
126 Aesthetica
film reviews
1
Shorta ANDERS ØLHOLM, FREDERIK LOUIS HVIID
Shorta begins with a queasily familiar scenario as a simmering tensions between the cops and the youthful 19-year-old named Talib Ben Hassi dies in police custo- Muslim community, much in the way Ladj Ly’s 2019 dy. Any similarities to the 2020 murder of George Floyd Oscar nominee Les Misérables did in the Parisian suburbs. Whilst directors Anders Ølholm and Frederik Louis Hviid in Minnesota are coincidental – this film was in post-production at that point. However, it’s a stark reminder that draw from action-survival tales like Assault on Precinct 13 and The Raid, albeit slightly less explosively, Shorta law enforcers always need to be policed too. As news spreads of Hassi’s death, two cops, Mike An- explores other dynamics too, as the two cops capture dersen (Jacob Lohmann) and Jens Høyer (Simon Sears), Amos and use him as protection to escape a tinderbox are caught in the firing line in Copenhagen’s Svalegården situation. Gradually, these lawmen come to see life from ghetto. An altercation with a young man, Amos (Tarek other perspectives – not least when Amos’ mother, in a Zayat), suddenly leaves them trapped in the warren-like contrived moment, comes to play nursemaid. Shorta is never subtle, but it manages to smuggle housing project, with little back-up from the outside. Everywhere they turn, there are masked assailants out for issues of racism, law and order and intolerance inside a lean, mean action tale. Moodily shot by Jacob Møller their blood, and it seems there's no way out. The title, Shorta, is an Arabic word, meaning “police”, and trimmed to a fat-free cut by editor Anders Albjerg and the film does a credible job of painting the Kristiansen, it’s a breathless but thoughtful experience.
Words James Mottram
vertigofilms.com
2
The Story of Looking MARK COUSINS
At first, it seems surprising that Mark Cousins chooses to begin The Story of Looking by showing an interview with the blind musician Ray Charles. When asked if he’d like to have the ability to see again, Charles waves it away, declaring that he doesn’t need to see his mother again, having already seen her once. Cousins, anxious about his own upcoming surgery for a cataract, is struck with the idea that memory is, in itself, a form of seeing, and this becomes a springboard for examining the different ways we use vision beyond our direct eyesight. Cousins effectively pinpoints the gravity of the situation as a visual artist; once his sight is changed by surgery, his way of looking will be changed forever, for good or bad. From the intimacy of the bedroom, he delivers a conversational lecture on the scientific factions of sight – focus, colour, light – whilst pondering personal
relationships to these and how they’ve been overturned in visual art. From Hasegawa Tohaku’s purposely blurred Pine Trees, painted in the 16th century to Brian Welsh’s black-and-white depiction of the 1990s rave scene in 2019 film Beats, Cousins trawls an impressively wide range of visual art media in such a short runtime. The Story of Looking, as with many recent films, was made during the COVID-19 lockdown, and in place of face-to-face interactions, social media plays a small but uplifting part in informing Cousins's journey through seeing. Reaching out on Twitter to ask for personal experiences of looking rewards Cousins with countless new perspectives that he hadn’t before considered. In its own quiet, yet truly passionate, way, the film presents a hopeful outlook on the diverse ways people engage with the act of looking, and share those sights with others.
Words Stephanie Watts
modernfilms.com
3
Sweetheart MARLEY MORRISON
Marley Morrison’s Sweetheart is the second film in a bucket hat – an ensemble that makes her unwittingly the past 12 months to use a British caravan park as its look like Harry Enfield’s sulky teenager Kevin – AJ is a setting, following Claire Oakley’s Make Up. Whilst that mass of shyness and hormones. Morrison captures adowas a psychological character study, Sweetheart is a lescence with real aplomb, as AJ falls for the lifeguard charming coming-of-age story. Nell Barlow plays April – Isla (Ella-Rae Smith), who seems worldly-wise. They soon or AJ as she now wants to be called – who is forced into a bond, but holiday romances are never straightforward. holiday on the Dorset coast with her mother Tina (This Is There’s a neat strain in observational humour sewn England’s Jo Hartley) and younger sister Dayna. into the story too. Morrison has clearly paid her Joining them is her older, pregnant sibling Lucy dues in holiday camps, dryly depicting the “family” (Sophia Di Martino) and her boyfriend Steve (Samuel entertainment (a magician with his contortionist assistant, Anderson), frequently the peacemaker as AJ, Lucy and “Bendy Wendy”; an 1980s-themed disco). However, just her mother come to blows. AJ is 17 and concerned about like the interactions between AJ and her family, this climate change, her dream is to head to Indonesia and is presented without cynicism or snark. As the title care for elephants. She’s also come out, something her hints, there is a subtle sweetness to Morrison’s movie – mother has tried desperately to understand. beautifully enacted by Barlow and Hartley, who might Sporting a shaggy brown crop, orange sunglasses and just be the best mum in British cinema right now.
Words James Mottram
peccapics.com
Aesthetica 127
128 Aesthetica
music reviews
1
Woman On The Internet ORLA GARTLAND
Dublin-born, London-based singer-songwriter-producer Orla Gartland has always used music as a vehicle for selfdiscovery. Inspired by pop acts like Avril Lavigne, she taught herself guitar from the age of 11, and by 14 was uploading original material to YouTube. Her folk-sound is influenced by singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush and Fiona Apple. Written during the first lockdown of 2020 at her studio in Acton, with assistance from co-producer Tom Stafford and Gartland’s own twopiece touring band, Woman On The Internet builds on the success of the EP Freckle Season (2020), moving between alt-rock, punk, folk and synth-pop, with a succession of intricate arrangements and lyrical observations of angst. Opening track Things That I’ve Learned is a creation of sparse wonder featuring taut, detailed percussion, detached guitars and outstanding vocal harmonies
including “Say what’s on your mind, every single time, don’t regret it.” This commitment to honesty is a recurrent theme – part of a wider desire for genuine connection. Indeed, the album title broadly describes a nameless, faceless figure giving guidance on how to navigate situations of helplessness. You’re Not Special, Babe demonstrates Gartland’s lyrical prowess further, commenting on the comfort that can be found in the universality of self-doubt. The plaintive and piano-led Left Behind melds a sweet, textural melody with vocal dexterity whilst More Like You references insecurity. Throughout, Gartland emphasises the importance of acknowledging emotions rather than suppressing them and subsequently entering a darker place. By embracing these imperfections, Gartland has created songs that have depth, feeling and a sense of empowerment.
Words Matt Swain
orlagartland.com
2
Deja BOMBA ESTÉREO
Colombian electro-folkloric dance is one hell of a descriptive mouthful, but somehow it perfectly sums up the mighty Voltron of an outfit that is Bomba Estéreo. This is a collaboration of extremely multi-talented musicians who draw upon the rich influences from their Latin American roots. If you think it sounds like beach music, that's because it's exactly that: created next to the sea in Santa Marta, where the mountains touch the coast. Undeniably vibey and constantly moving, the record has equal parts dance as it does melancholy, with long lost memory-evoking chords sandwiched beautifully next to four to the floor kick drums. It is unsurprising that, from perfecting their unique sound of hybrid-beats, they have a track record of being Grammy-nominated. They can also, excitingly, can count Barack Obama as a fan. The album is divided conceptually into four sections:
Agua (Water), Aire (Air), Tierra (Earth) and Fuego (Fire), reflecting a deeper message about reconnecting to the natural world, and releasing ourselves from the grips of technology. In the vein of giving in to the overarching timeless power of the natural world, every song feels like a wave of effortless and hopeful energy. The jogging percussion of Tamborero is powerful and transportive to a much sunnier place. The sadness of Ahora is painful, and yet it still forces you to move. The late-night jubilance of Amor Amor channels the unrelenting Fuego with ease. Title track Deja showcases singer Liliana Saumet's intricate harmonies over the marching Caribbean drum rhythm. The collaboration Feel with fan favourites Crystal Fighters is as wonderful as anyone could expect, firmly rooted in 4am somewhere twilighty and not of this world. A glimmering summer listen.
Words Kyle Bryony
bombaestereo.com
3
Amazing Things DON BROCO
Four albums deep, chart-topping British rockers Don Broco returns with a heavy landscape of hopeful, festival ready, fists-in-the-air bangers. It is a more varied bag of tracks than you would expect, bundled with choppy glitches and slower moments making the journey end somewhere far more differently than expected by the end of the twelve songs. The push and pull of Swimwear Season feels way darker than the title suggests, jaunty like a Gorillaz track, but with the all of the necessary melancholy that comes along with it. Bad 4 Ur Health somehow feels like half Metronomy, half Limp Bizkit, which is as nuts as it sounds – with the only weakness being when it moves more into rap territory. The wavering guitar line and key changes of One True Prince add to the major blockbuster style emotion, feeling like a scene in which, you save your
only life-long love from a burning building or the world from an asteroid. Super high-stakes music indeed. The highlight of the record is slotted right in the centre, with the slower and more introspective Anaheim, which is an arcane surprise in the midst of fire and brimstone. The record meanders like an Alt-J album, with programmed drums and heartfelt melodies reverbing to giant church ceiling proportions. Some songs are as lyrically on the nose as you might expect, like expositional film dialogue. Revenge Body is exactly what you think it is: detailing the act of working on your self-image in the gym using the strongest of personal encouragement – revenge – over epic, rolling drums. The guitars throughout are technically insane and brilliant, and for essentially a pop rock record, it’s pretty damn good. Jump up music for a time, hopefully, soon.
Words Kyle Bryony
donbroco.com
Aesthetica 129
130 Aesthetica
book reviews
1
Portrait of Humanity Vol 3 1854 MEDIA / BRITISH JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY
“In years to come, I suspect the past year will make us especially grateful for photography’s ability to serve as a record,” says author Otegha Uwagba. “Though this has undoubtedly been a year that many would rather forget, we must not.” 2020 was defined by global struggle, crisis and upheaval, but it also inspired resilience. Portrait of Humanity, the global photography award, returns with a vast and moving exploration of what it means to be human. Conceived to show that “across oceans and borders, there is more that unites us than sets as apart,” the book comprises images of siblings, friends, parents, partners, communities and individuals around the world. At this moment in history, messages of hope, courage and connection are more important than ever. On the cover is a powerful picture by Paolo Barretta, capturing a couple – Marco and Stefano – who have
been social distancing for three months. It was taken just as the lockdown in Italy ended. The pair embrace, separated only by yellow face masks. Titled So Much Stronger Than Hate, the photograph is an enduring symbol of love in the pandemic era. “There are so many reasons why I consider this picture so important to me,” Barretta says. “It’s not just portraying someone kissing. This is the story of people who fight, people who resist, people who stay together against this crazy world.” Elsewhere, Aesthetica Art Prize alumnus Julia FullertonBatten documents people in their homes from outside. Through glass windowpanes, she visualises the experience of lockdown and nationwide confinement. From teachers to priests, cowboys to beekeepers, grandmothers to schoolchildren, the subjects represented in Portrait of Humanity hold up a mirror to the world as it is now.
Words Eleanor Sutherland
Hoxton Mini Press hoxtonminipress.com
2
Land Art Photographs GIANFRANCO GORGONI
Last year marked the 50th anniversary of Gianfranco Gorgoni’s (b. 1941) first photographs in the desert. The Italian photographer travelled from New York to Utah in the 1970s and began his journey documenting the careers of Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer and Judy Chicago. Sometimes monumental, sometimes ephemeral, the earthworks Gorgoni captured later came to be known as Land Art. This book offers a comprehensive overview of the movement as it burgeoned during the 1960s, and whose legacy continues today. Robert Smithson’s iconic Spiral Jetty (1970) is an incredible feat of labour and artistry. Gorgoni’s camerawork is a stunning account of the artwork’s scale, his images often taken both above and from ground level. Smithson and two others were killed in a plane crash at the site of Amarillo Ramp, another of his interventions, in
1973. The same year, Gorgoni returned to the site where parts of the aeroplane were still scattered everywhere on the ground. He insisted on the importance of the aerial shot. “They looked at me funny when I said I wanted to go up,” he stated, “but I said, ‘This piece already took the lives of three people. It isn’t going to get me.’” This drive to obtain “a complete view” that is not simply in parallel but from above, is key to understanding Gorgoni’s talent. There is a wonderful essay by Germano Celant that places this in context of the first photograph of the earth taken from space published in Life in 1964. Celant’s insistence on the impersonal, “mechanical eye” repositions the terrestrial as extra-terrestrial, a new possibility and horizon for humanity that Land Art speaks to, and which Gorgoni’s image-making perfectly captures in this posthumous collection of important artwork.
Words Jack Solloway
Monacelli monacellipress.com
3
Woman Made JANE HALL
The introduction to this detailed compendium of contemporary women designers features a series of diverting anecdotes. Brutalist architect Alison Smithson, we learn, loved Peter Rabbit’s kitchen, whose decorative arrangements of pans “epitomised what she conceived of as a deeply personal form of design.” Margarete SchütteLihotzky, famed for the high-modernist Frankfurt Kitchen (1926), claimed to have no idea how to cook. The design was so effective, because she listened to other women's opinions on how they should be arranged. The point of these vignettes is to suggest that, whilst pioneering women designers might not have thought of themselves as explicitly working towards liberation, they were united by an implicit “feminist design methodology.” This often involved an elevation of the domestic sphere to which women were generally confined to an
object of methodological scrutiny, and bringing a newly quizzical eye to habitual, invisibly gendered paradigms. From Cini Boeri’s creation of houses with single sleeping units to Jane Dillon’s bright pink “moveable chair,” women designers often deconstructed patriarchal norms embedded in functional objects without aiming to do so. The rise of female technical education across the 20th century also had a role to play in nurturing great women designers – even if, as Hall points, out, this was often not matched by professional credit. A precedent here is the Bauhaus’ textile department, a number of whose alumni feature, from Anni Albers to the lesser-known ceramics of Margarete Heymann-Löbenstein. Hall’s catalogue is also alert to the work of contemporaries, such as Lani Adeoye's Bata Stool, inspired by Yoruba craft, and Scot Donna Wilson’s beautifully misshapen woolly lion.
Words Greg Thomas
Phaidon phaidon.com
Aesthetica 131
132 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 133
134 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 135
136 Aesthetica
Aesthetica 137
Body painting: Jennifer Green. Hair artist: Falon Jaloi.
artists’ directory
DESIREE CYGANEK Desiree Cyganek is a New York-based photographer of French and African descent – a native of Ivory Coast. She works across portrait, fashion and fine art, capturing the essence of models and their emotions, with an adroit and recognisable aesthetic. Her personal series, African Statues, is striking and sculptural – models are adorned with traditional objects, colours and patterns.
desireecyganek.com
SUYU CHEN Originally from China and based in the USA, Suyu Chen holds an MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her jewellery and wearable objects are inspired by living in different places and experiencing relationships through the lens of her cultural background. The pieces reveal repetitive experimental explorations of alternative materials such as PVC tubes combined with fine metal practices – resulting in unique forms.
suyuchen.com I Instagram: @suyu_chen_
138 Aesthetica
MARYIA WALKER (SKARAKHOD) Maryia Walker (Skarakhod) is a Belarusian-American artist and writer based in Denver. She combines intuitive art and poetry in order to experience a deeper connection with the subconscious and transform natural feelings of joy, pleasure, love and abundance through colours and words.
joseartgallery.com/artists/Maryia_Walker Instagram: @maryiawalkerartist
TIANYUAN HU Tianyuan Hu is student at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her practice explores alienation, traversing spaces between the lucid and the lunatic. The Amorph series expresses these themes as drawn from observations during lockdown; the works depict unsystematic moments when identities and perceptions haven’t been theorised into any definitive meaning or criteria.
tianyuan.online I Instagram: @oldastrotooth
MONICA VANZANT
PALAK PATEL
Monica Vanzant was born in Hawaii and is based in New Jersey. A painter whose primary medium is oil, she explores how pattern and texture interrelate to help tell a story. Ideas spring forth through a variety of subject matter, including portraits, landscapes and still lifes. Vanzant has participated in numerous exhibitions throughout the USA.
Palak Patel is an Indian abstract artist based in London. She finds inspiration from aspects of her heritage and also from everyday-observed shapes and patterns. The resulting artworks feature gold and silver leaf combined with acrylic to achieve light and depth. Patel continuously experiments with a variety of materials to find new ways of expressing texture on canvas.
monicavanzant.com I monicavanzant.blogspot.com
palakpatel.art I Instagram: @palakpatelart
SYLVANA BURNS Sylvana Burns is a Mexican visual artist based in London, whose practice revolves around the female body, its representation and sexuality as a form of existence in itself. The work is a constant search in which the artist comes to terms with the burden of being meaning – specifically being meaning as a female. Burns notes: "It is no understatement to say that the female body has been highly looked at and sexualised in our society for millennia within the arts, religion and science." In photographs such as those in the meta-Dissected series, Burns utilises the body and the idea of the historical nude to question its expression through a contemporary female eye.
studiosylvana.com I Instagram: @studiosylvana
Aesthetica 139
artists’ directory
alex ewerth
anita Lortije
Multidisciplinary artist Alex Ewerth holds degrees from Chelsea College of Arts and Central Saint Martins. Her practice includes painting, sculpture and installation; she is strongly influenced by unconventional materials. This can be seen in works such as Kyoto. Ewerth has participated in numerous international exhibitions. Based in Hamburg, she is represented by Galerie Holthoff. alex-fine-arts.com I Instagram: @alexandraewerth
Shape, colour, pattern and size are elements in the work of Maastrichtbased Anita Lortije. The alignment of these key strands ensures harmony, whilst painting with transparent hues allows the wood grain to be visible and provide depth. Lortije brings fairy tales to life by creating decorative furniture and wooden sculptures under the brand name Unicorn Creation. unicorncreation.nl
BRENDON MARCZAN
brett dyer
Brendon Marczan is a painter and illustrator based in London. Many of his artworks feature a tipi symbol – a nod to the traditional dwellings of some Indigenous Canadians and Native Americans. These triangular shapes represent shelter, safety and home. The tight patterns throughout Marczan's work further reinforce a sense of community in fractured times. brendonmarczan.com I Instagram: @brendonmarczan
Brett Dyer is an award-winning artist and professor based near Dallas. His latest series combines abstract figures with evocative colours, patterns and textures, revealing the complexity of the human spirit. Dyer’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions throughout the USA. brettdyerart.com I Instagram: @brettleedyer
Claudia Pombo
derek morris
Brazilian-Dutch painter Claudia Pombo offers an adapted view of nature and human situations. Her creative expressions include detailed illustrations of Amazonian mythology, metaphysical art, as well as colour-rich landscapes. The painting shown here is entitled Last Breath. clpombo.wordpress.com
Derek Morris is a Norwich-based artist who combines geometry, light and colour to full effect, creating constructed art pieces that are held in public and private collections. He holds a first class honours degree in Sculpture from Newcastle University and has developed a degree-level sculpture course at the Norwich School of Art. He later became President of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. derekmorrissculptor.co.uk
140 Aesthetica
Ioannis Galanopoulos-Papavasileiou
joe gilling
Ioannis Galanopoulos-Papavasileiou aka Yiannis Galanopoulos is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Zayed University, Abu Dhabi. His art practice examines place and identity, specifically the relationship between ideated, geographic and virtual place and the connections between objects, artists, the media, viewers and wider society. He has participated in numerous exhibitions throughout the world. lefteyer.com
Joe Gilling is a Brighton-based artist whose audiovisual projects reflect upon our relationships with virtual spaces, how we interact with digital media and the consequences of exponential tech consumerism. His current approach to sound is haunted by the aesthetics of failure and a distorted vision of the future. joegillingmusic.com I IG: @joegillingmusic
judie long
julie reid
New York-based photographer Judie Long demonstrates a love for her subject matter as well as the action of creation. Scenes are captured with an eye for what she believes the viewer will appreciate seeing every day; the use of vivid colours and bold black and white are key in creating the artworks. Long's images are purchased as museum-quality framed works or ready-to-frame paper prints. judielong.com I IG: @ajudieoriginal
UK-based Julie Reid creates a dialogue between mark making, surface, interwoven collage materials and paint, in a journey to search the very essence of human interaction with the environment. Carefully chosen words, from a variety of texts, are woven into each piece, creating a visual poem – inviting the viewer to look deeper than the surface of the work. juliereid.co.uk I Instagram: @julesfineart
Marcus Hamilton
mitch greer
London-based infrared photographer Marcus Hamilton uses a light spectrum imperceptible to the human eye; the resulting surreal images allow us to see what was once invisible. Many of the black-and-white abstract works are inspired by Modernism. Hamilton's photographs were recently exhibited at the London Art Biennale 2021. icanhearthegrassgrow.com I Instagram: @marcushamilton_infrared
Mitch Greer's work examines alternative states: non-objective ideation and processes of envisioning such as that of dream and memory. Explorations of these intersecting cognitive states are guided by mythological, folk, spiritual, popular and religious traditions. The resulting visual artworks are influenced by animated films, Zen, Abstraction and Impressionism. mitchgreer.com I Instagram: @spaceagecrystal
For submission enquiries regarding the Artists’ Directory, contact Katherine Smira on directory@aestheticamagazine.com
Aesthetica 141
artists’ directory
Miya Turnbull
Ole Gahms Henriksen
Canadian artist Miya Turnbull is a mask-maker who also works with other mediums such as photography and video. She creates self-portraits as a way to explore identity, persona and self-image. The masks often show a manipulated representation of herself, which she then wears as a "false face" or "second skin". The artist has presented work across Canada and beyond. miyaturnbull.com I IG: @miyamask I YouTube: Miya Turnbull
Ole Gahms Henriksen is a Danish painter and ceramicist based in Spain. Using a variety of mediums, he plays with light, repetition and layers, although it is colour that is of paramount importance in his latest largescale series. Each oil-on-canvas painting is 90cm x 73cm and expresses a current perspective his everyday life and surroundings in 2021. olegahms.eu
Perilu Huang
Sachi Satomi
Chinese artist Perilu Huang holds a Media Production degree from the University of Sussex. She specialises in post-processing of photographs with graffiti and collage; the aim is to dilute stereotypes of familiar scenes and information in our memories. Her latest series – inspired by Magritte's The Son of Man – highlights the mysterious and two-sided nature of the Covid-19 pandemic. lulu-zi.com
Sachi Satomi is a Japanese artist based in Venice. Her multidisciplinary practice includes painting, sculpture and installation, for which she seeks inspiration – which is so important in the creative process – from within. Satomi notes: “Often the important things are not visible to the naked eye and these are what I would like to shed light on." sachisatomi.com
Viola Sevostianova
Yana Grishchuk
Viola Sevostianova explores contemporary sociopolitical issues and uses her art practice to convey messages regarding racism, feminism and religion. She uses personal experiences to express feelings of solidarity with others – she finds this more important than the form and structure of the work itself. Sevostianova is based in Moscow and collaborates with London-based art curator Anna Nesterenko. violasevostianova.com
Yana Grishchuk is a Los Angeles-based artist who works with concrete, photography and performance. She notes: "I adore concrete’s simplicity and potential. It’s fragile and monumental, vulnerable and brutal, plastic and dense at the same time. I am attracted to its duality." Grishchuk uses natural stones, acrylic and shiny dust to create unique sculptural pieces. yanagrishchuk.com | Instagram: @yana_g_artist
142 Aesthetica
Aivaras Simonis
Elvira Daeter
Aivaras Simonis is a contemporary still life and product photographer whose work expresses the beauty of objects in striking, conceptual worlds. His latest personal series is entitled Tension, in which Simonis uses unrelated items to explore the relationship between materials. Colour, composition and elements are manipulated in a search for tension. aivarassimonis.com Instagram: @aivaras_simonis
Elvira Daeter is a Dutch painter and sculptor based in Middelburg. Line, shape, colour, contrast and light drive her playful geometric works. She notes: "Aesthetic emotion and purity in art is indefinable. It cannot be explained by other means – it can only be recognised and felt by the viewer." Daeter won first prize at the 2015 Biennial: Origins in Geometry, Dallas. dutch-abstract-art.com Instagram: @deveerschepoort
Emilia Switala
Hayley brown
White Noise is a series of paintings by Poland-based visual artist Emilia Switala. The works are a personal expression of motherhood during the pandemic and are intended as an antidote: "a calming experience during the bitter-tasting stress of Covid-19." Switala employs her own unique painting technique, using cake industry tools to symbolise the sweetness of art. emiliaswitala.com Instagram: @emiliaswitala
Hayley Brown is a UK-based art and photography teacher. Her current series Living with Endometriosis documents the diagnosis and personal experience of this longterm condition. The multilayered images are a visual representation of the emotional and physical trauma on an intimate area of the body. A web of lining and scar tissue that has grown around the womb is portrayed in a unique way. Instagram: @liv.ingwithendo
Irina Tomashova
jaehee yoo
Russian artist Irina Tomashova is a former IT teacher. In her art practice, she explores the socialisation of a person within contemporary society. For the I Want Your Tongue series, she left an encrypted message using the Vigenère cipher. Each canvas has its own part of the cipher; together the canvases form a cipher phrase. The key to the cipher is in another picture, which is located in Tomashova's house. Instagram: @irina.tomashova_artist
Using plant dyes, traditional paper and natural scenery, Seoul-based Jaehee Yoo's practice draws upon materials and techniques from ancient South Korea. Works in the mixed media Solitude series are indicative of tradition and identity, revealing personal memories and emotions surrounding solitary landscapes. Yoo will be exhibiting work at Fira Internacional d’Art de Barcelona 2021. Instagram: @jaeheeyoo78
JAHAN GERRARD
Jordan Garelick
Jahan Gerrard is a USSR-born, UKbased painter whose upbringing in an artistic household has shaped both her inspirations and career. The bold, colourful works are created via a dialogue between Gerrard and the canvas; it is where drama unfolds – happiness, anger, fear, sadness and struggle. The intention is for the artist to surprise herself. jahangerrard.co.uk Instagram: @jahangerrard
Originally from Denver, Jordan Garelick is based in Chicago where they studied Visual Art at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Their work is centred on exploring communication and fluidity, and how they work within boundaries such as time and space. Garelick notes: "Freedom is a priority in my work and I resist putting it in one box when possible." jordangarelickart.com Instagram: @splitthedifference2000
For submission enquiries regarding the Artists’ Directory, contact Katherine Smira on directory@aestheticamagazine.com
Aesthetica 143
artists’ directory
Katja Kolesnik
Kerry Milligan
Katja Kolesnik's painting is imbued with protrahere – the Latin word meaning "to bring to light" – in an attempt to make the innermost of a person visible. She explores the tension between reality and the idealisation seen in advertising and soap operas. Kolesnik appropriates the picture of a stranger by searching for herself in them, to build up an image and destroy it, to create something that goes beyond representation. katja-split.de
Canadian artist Kerry Milligan enjoys the freedom of intuitive explorations with colour, form and line variations observed in nature. She aims to "create simplified, serene compositions that awaken a memory of a place visited, imagined or envisioned in a dream. The works range from semi-abstract to more detailed landscape scenery; bands of colour and organic forms that dissolve into one another." kmstudioart.com
oliver haussmann
Ori Gerard Frances
What influence does digitalisation have on our perception? The works of German artist Oliver Haussmann move between analogue and digital aesthetics. Through a material dialogue and experimentation, he resolves apparent contradictions. Oscillating liquids meet digitallygenerated arrangements and question the production process of classical painting. Instagram: @oliver.haussmann
The work of photographer and digital artist Ori Gerard Frances has been widely exhibited. He believes the language of poetry and art is the only way to express certain aspects of our experience of reality in subtle and complex ways. Recent awards and honourable mentions include the Tokyo International Foto Awards, the IPA’s International Photography Awards and the MonoVisions Photography Awards. origerard.myportfolio.com
Paneras Stavros
Sheree Murphy
Greece-based artist Paneras Stavros studies the relationship between faith and artificial intelligence. He explores new and emerging institutional and social conditions, examining the possibility of sharing our thoughts and secrets not to a traditional faith leader but to AI. Stavros' work poses questions around trust and whether AI could counsel and even motivate us to become better humans. Instagram: @stav_pane
Sheree Murphy is a Welsh artist whose interdisciplinary practice includes photography, video and painting; her work is evocative and connects to the human soul of change and difference. The piece shown here is Untitled c.2021, part of the Hollywood Asylum collection which focuses on fame, celebrity and its institutionally intrinsic nature. Murphy has exhibited art in New York and London. thedryingroom.org
stephan crawford
Svitlana Moiseienko
Multidisciplinary artist Stephan Crawford is interested in reflecting on the natural world and our human interactions within it. Alongside his studio practice, Crawford founded The ClimateMusic Project – an arts/ science/technology collaborative whose powerful performances have garnered international media coverage, including profiles by the BBC and The New York Times. www.sc2arts.com www.climatemusic.org
Svitlana Moiseienko is a Ukrainebased photographer who explores delicate details found in the natural world. Her latest series Multiflower was created by photographing close-ups of blooms, using multiple exposure to create a sense of depth and texture. The resulting compositions reflect Moiseienko's respect for nature in all its forms. svitlanamoiseienko.wixsite.com/ my-site Instagram: @__sweetlanka__
144 Aesthetica
The Destination for Art and Culture
Subscribe & Save 40% 12 months from £20.95 + p&p. Available in both print and digital formats.
www.aestheticamagazine.com/subscribe Aesthetica 145
Frauke Huber & Uwe H. Martin, Colorado River_All American Canal. From LandRush – Ventures into Global Agriculture.
last words
Daniela Del Fabbro Curator, Centre national de l'audiovisuel
146 Aesthetica
“The pandemic has shifted the food industry and its impact. The many lockdowns, during which the food sector had to remain operational in order to feed nations and support global health, have put food chains in a different perspective. This is a perfect context for the work of Frauke Huber and Uwe H. Martin, who have dedicated the last 15 years to exploring modern-day agriculture through personal and intimate stories of different stakeholders, all whilst conveying to them complex underlying scientific, political, legal and philosophical ideas. We hope that audiences will leave with more questions than answers, which is symbolic for the time in which we live: nothing is black or white, but there are many in-betweens.” LandRush – Ventures into global agriculture, is at Pomhouse, CNA, Luxembourg, until 29 August. cna.public.lu.
Aesthetica 147
148 Aesthetica