The Future is Ours
Visions of the future by seven young European photographers
The exhibition is on view:
September 14, 2018 – September 23, 2018
Venue: Landskrona Foto Festival
Curator: Emese Mucsi
Exhibiting artists: Antonina Gugała (PL), Ramona Güntert (DE), Pedro Sabino Koch (PT), Joshua Phillips (UK), Milán Rácmolnár (HU), Laura Rämö (FI), Jacopo Tomassini (IT)
The Future is ours. This is a phrase which has ambivalent meanings for the emerging photographers from all over Europe who take part in this exhibition initiated by Parallel European Photography Platform at Landskrona Photo Festival.
On the one hand, the seven participating artists still remember the feelings from the 2000’s when this sentence sounded so enthusiastic and emancipating to them, members of the Generation Next who were born between the 80’s and the mid 90’s. On the other hand, by now, in the era of the q-tip holder seahorse and the turtle deformed by a six-pack ring, its connotations had gotten more and more depressing and gloomy. The phrase constantly reminds them of their responsibilities as visual artists of capturing visions of our seemingly post-apocalyptic future.
What is the role of contemporary artists and knowledge producers in an era of crisis? Artists can combine the creative and emotionally moving power of the arts with the planning strategies of activism to bring about social change. Or they can make the viewer contemplate the possible solutions to the crisis by reminding them of the impermanence of life and inevitable death. These reminders do not activize directly and lack any form of didactics; instead, they offer a sensual influence that affects the viewer.
There is an image in Histories, a photo series by Antonina Gugała, that depicts an abandoned white plastic chair situated somewhere in the precarious landscape of post-depression Greece. The object is a symbol of transiency—it brings to mind a typical tool of international relief organizations and, at the same time, it resembles a skeleton. This photograph belongs to the first chapter of a project in which Gugała examines the European identity crisis by referencing modern day Greek history. The everyday objects serve as a metaphor for the peculiar stage in history, when the new order of things has not been established yet, and provisory but livable settings are still underway. In the exhibition Gugała juxtaposes modern-day objects, abandoned places, ancient historical mementos and dumped cars with photographs taken at the National Museum in Warsaw. To visualize the universal impact of the Greek Depression, she highlights the connections between everyday objects found on the streets of Greece throughout 2017 and ancient artefacts from the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw, which are evocative of the foundations of European identity.
Joshua Phillips usually proceeds by choosing a photograph and using it as an impulsion to scrutinize ideas and compose research, often taking the stance of a historic position and the framing of an artefact as a starting point. He leads the viewer to ponder the autonomous life of the presented image, using various materials from appropriation of commonplace pictures to imagery taken by himself. His recent work, For a Long Time Now I Have Fallen to Sleep with the TV Turned On acquired its concerns from the cultural legacy of William Morris who thought that interior design played a fundamental role in the transformation of everyday life. Phillips is interested in the highly schematized depictions of nature within Morris’s oeuvre as a designer and craftsman. These are utopian visions of a landscape, always fruitful, never barren – a picture that contradicts the real conditions of the rapidly expanding industrialisation of the Victorian era. The natural motifs grow over entire interiors, covering walls, floors and furniture – bringing the outside in. The concept of replaceable nature comes from a period when economic transformation put society to a new and irreversible economic trajectory thus the re-examination of this concept in the era of climate change is more than just a cultural research.
Pedro Sabino Koch as a professional nature photographer, photographer of aquatic sports and a surfer has a complex relationship with the ocean – he is monitoring it from the bottom to the surface and to the coast, being more than just mere observer. In his recent project Epoch he focuses on this majestic natural phenomena, an infinite source of calm contemplation, the image of which is constantly disturbing at the same time being the main factor and indicator of the current ecological crisis on Earth. In his photofilm Koch projects a quite dark and mournful vision of its future by putting off the bright colours of the ocean, depriving the water of its comforting sounds and schematizing the movements of the frothing waves with grayscale stop motion animation. The well-known natural formation converted into black and white still bears the notion of sublime due to the properties of the black colour, but it entirely lost its organic nature.
Ramona Güntert’s work that can be placed in the intersection of abstract photography and body representation invites the viewers to use both their tactile references and their experiences of organic nature. She mixes different stylistic and thematic codes and creates genre hybrids in her project entitled Iri. She does not seek to make a pleasant fusion but rather an anxious confusion of things. The hybrid that emerges can be a post-human creature, a metamorphosis. Taboos are ignored and a superabundance of body parts, hair, fur, flakes and iridescent fluids flood the picture. Repulsive and attractive; uncanny and distracting. Objects reiterate or mirror each other creating their own cyclic movements. It is always a becoming, a form-forming form, from one point to the other without an end. In these non-anthropocentric abstractions the flesh, the organs, the cornified body parts are not only released from the burden of integrity of a sterile and well-formed living body but also from the existence of a human being as such. One can interpret them as an act of transcending the anthropocentric-humanistic aesthetics, as the dramatization of the shift toward non-human stages of existence, or as the progressive subversion of canons concerning the representation of human beings.
Milan Rácmolnár’s primary area of interest within photography is how it can be some kind of completion to human perception. He considers the camera as a prosthesis and does constant research on this human-machine amalgamation and its possible evolutionary consequences. His objective consist in making things visible that cannot be perceived otherwise. In his most recent project he dealt with physical forces hence gave the name of the series Substance. The phenomena he examined are relatively ubiquitous but they happen faster than one could get aware of them, or in a non-visual way, e.g. magnetism and surface tension. He looked for the most characteristic manifestations of these events and sought the ways of making these essentially not pictorial things into pictures. In the photographs these forces appear as timeless icons, as odd-looking objects or sculptures. They just look like some strangely textured, unrecognizable matters from the distance, but getting closer, the viewer can be lost in the prolific details of the dueling forces.
Who has ever wondered that the future of photography once could be memento mori? Creating a valid vanitas project without falling into the trap of producing a meaningless tribute or epigonism nowadays is difficult, but because of the genre’s apocalyptic message the undertaking remains relevant. In her photo series Fallen Matter, Laura Rämö focuses on lost, thus decontextualized, objects, e.g. a headless rubber puppy (Void) she found on the street. These images representing broken, dysfunctional, inorganic waste allow the interpretation of contemporary still lifes – still lifes because as proper vanitas pictures they convey the notion of death, and contemporary because the trash refers to the long degradation time of plastic waste causing unpredictable consequences and threatening organic life forms on Earth. Timepiece, a series within a series highlights six different phases of a broken toy hourglass, presenting the movement of the falling grains of sand, evoking the connotations of this object as a strong medieval symbol of decay.
Jacopo Tomassini also composes still lifes continuing one of the strongest Italian artistic tradition in the context of contemporary photography with many of his works. As its title shows, the photos in his series Balance&Shape were influenced by not just the great masters of Italian painting, but by Peter Fischli’s and David Weiss’s photographs of household objects and studio detritus arranged to form tenuously-balanced assemblages. In this selection of images Tomassini captured rotten fruits, a dysfunctional filmstrip, some spilled liquid, a dish towel, and a duster among other objects. Cleaning products in the domestic environment refers to the contemporary tendency of overcleaning, the abhorrence of dirt and the maniac struggle against bacteria which can be considered as the constant and general fear of death.
Seven personal interviews made with each artists are published in this exhibition catalogue and displayed on site as part of the show adding broader context to the artworks. In these conversations the photographers give an insight to their studios, their intimate surroundings where their works are produced – they tell about their educational background, inspirations, artistic practices, experiments, readings, statements, and elaborate on their future visions.
Contemporary vanitas snapshots; photo series based on the analysis of archival materials belonging to a historical museum; meticulously composed and captured uncanny visions of post-human body parts; seascape photo films and conceptual photo installations based on ornamental wallpapers as photographic research projects of natural phenomena – the works on show are dynamic ‘visions-in-the-future’ grounded in a present that still has a chance, maybe the last, to alter its future to come.
Parallel European Based Photo Platform
Challenging and eclectic, contemporary photography defies boundaries and definition. Once a cultural object, photography then became a cultural-social-artistic practice which engages a wide range of aesthetics, technologies and actors, most of them overlapping and intersecting. All this diversity was instrumental in inspiring the creation of PARALLEL. PARALLEL is a platform that brings together creative European organizations committed to promoting crosscultural exchanges and mentorships in order to set new standards in contemporary photography. Members include museums, galleries, cultural centres, festivals, art schools and publishers – 18 of the most vibrant European cultural hubs, from 16 diferent countries, that will participate in selecting and hosting emerging artists and curators, organizing exhibitions and promoting artistic networking. The large and diverse nature of this network ensures a wide geographical spread and a fertile ground for fostering new dialogues, sparking fresh ideas and helping to boost creativity. The project is implemented as a two-phase process: Creative Guidance: selection, tutoring, peer learning and curatorship for emergent creators; Exhibition Platform: a wide exhibition network engaging exhibitors, universities and art schools. PARALLEL is designed and led by Procur.arte and cofunded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
Landskrona Foto Festival
andskrona Foto is one of the most important institutions in Scandinavia for photographic mediation, research and conservation. The key activities for Landskrona Foto are exhibitions, photographic history, research, the conservation of the photographic heritage, an annual photo festival and support for contemporary artists.
The authority responsible for this is the Cultural Amenities Committee of Landskrona, which has a fixed allocation in the municipal budget as the financial foundation. In addition we receive grants from regional, national and Nordic cultural organizations as well as generous support from many companies with an interest in the activities and in Landskrona.
The politically established goal is that Landskrona Foto will pursue such a wide range of activities of such quality that Landskrona can justifiably call itself the Capital of Photography in Scandinavia. We aim to achieve that goal by 2020.
The festival is Landskrona Foto’s beacon, the annual meeting point for photographers and for the photo- and art-interested public in Northern Europe. Since it started in 2013 the ambition has been to show art and documentary photography of the highest class from a blend of countries. It’s also important for photography to manifest itself in public spaces, from shop windows to parks and old buildings, and become a perceptible part of experiencing the city.