DAISUKE YOKOTA
PAOLO CIREGIA
TAEJOONG KIM
ILONA SZWARC
Japanese photographer Daisuke Yokota is the winner of the 10th Foam Paul Huf Award. He is in the vanguard of a new movement of Japanese experimental photographers and has a meticulous and demanding approach to photography. His work is that of an obsessive. He shoots on a compact digital camera, before printing and re-photographing the images on medium-format film. He then prints and reprints again and again using heat and light, or applying acid or naked flame to the end results. The images become distorted, warped, otherworldly. Yokota has established a formidable reputation as a young artist with the ability to take photography forward into ever more original directions; from prints to artist’s books, installations and collaborative performance, and always with an unmistakable visual language.
In the last five years, Paolo Ciregia’s artistic research has been focused primarily on Ukraine, documenting the RussianUkrainian conflict through a series of photographs that he later manipulates and reworks. By decontextualizing both his photographs and found materials he creates a new iconographic register that is linked to war and political propaganda. Political ideologies, alienation and means of mass control are topics on which he has based his research for Exeresi. By dissecting and reworking the language used by totalitarian establishments, Ciregia’s aim is to reveal the atrocities behind war and to destroy the false and arrogant patina created by propaganda.
South Korean photographer Taejoong Kim is enthralled by the layered depth of forests, which have served as a backdrop for a number of his projects, and where he searches for an antidote to the mediated experiences of contemporary life. Beyond the dense pine trees of his native Korea, wherever Kim has travelled in the early years of his career, the forest has so often followed. The woodlands of France, Poland and most notably Germany’s Black Forest – where Kim shot his Solitas series in 2011 – have helped shape his sense of place, as well as his sense of proximity to his mother country. In Foresta – reverse, Kim’s prints, characteristically accompanied by video installations, immerse the viewer between the trees, capturing two sides of a forest scene.
Taking inspiration from stage make-up tutorials, Ilona Szwarc plays with the surfaces that we construct to produce and affirm our identity. The intersection of painting, cinema and theatre allows her to adopt a directorial mode and test the nature of our physical self. By following instruction manuals and reinterpreting them through her female gaze, often mimicking the persona of a male make-up artist, she is able to see what happens when gender roles are reversed and lines between passive and active bodies are blurred. By dismantling these constructs, by taking apart the language of identification, she gives birth to hybrid identities and in-between spaces ripe with the tensions, breakthroughs and catharsis that exist within the sphere of possibility.
LOUISE PARKER
ALEXANDRA HUNTS
SAM CONTIS
NICOLÓ DEGIORGIS
Pieces of Me is a self-portrait series of collages that Parker, both an artist and a professional fashion model, began working on in 2015. She sourced original images of herself exclusively from magazines. Each collage begins with a meticulous dissection of parts before Parker begins to rearrange and reassemble the pieces into a new and original composition. One work is an arrangement of arms and hands on a simple paper background, as a way to represent a recurring sense of detachment from her own body. Another work sources all the elements of her body from a twelve-page magazine spread, cut up and rearranged to create a disproportionate and contorted figure.
Alexandra Hunts is interested in invisible phenomena, constructed logic, commemoration and memory, as well as the loss of memory over time. She set out to photograph the long process of evaporation. Her experiment involved photographing a glass of water every twelve hours, day after day, until the water had disappeared. Her series of images was assembled to create a time-lapse sequence, a photo archive made up of 154 printed and folded photographs in chronological order that gives a graphic representation of the evaporation process in a single image. Her camera becomes our time machine. Substance of Time and Space is a scientific documentation of a physical effect, a change of substance over time, captured as a photo-object.
Between 2013 and 2015, Sam Contis made a series in the Deep Springs Valley of California, where one of the country’s last remaining all-male colleges sits just east of the Sierras and a few miles north of Death Valley. The college is very isolated; the closest gas station is an hour’s drive away. The students, twenty-six in total, came to this remote desert wilderness to seek an alternative form of education. Aside from their studies, they spend long hours of every day working the college’s alfalfa farm and cattle ranch. Deep Springs is motivated by Contis’ desire to offer a new perspective on the American West and its inhabitants, as well as to find a place where she feels at home. She is interested in questioning the old-fashioned notion of masculinity in the West and making space for a broader discussion of gender and identity.
There are 1.35 million Muslims in Italy but only eight official mosques in the whole country. Despite being the second largest religion after Catholicism, Islam is not formally recognized by the state. There are hundreds of unofficial Islamic places of worship hidden away behind the anonymous facades of sports centres, warehouses and apartment buildings. Unless you know where to look these places of worship are invisible. Degiorgis set out to photograph them for Hidden Islam. In some you sense the temporary nature of the transformation of these spaces, where carpets, prayer mats and minbars will be in place only for a short while. In others, the tiling, the taps and the water troughs mark a more permanent transformation of space.
TALENT
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