UNFIXED

Photography and Postcolonial Perspectives in Contemporary Art

Sara Blokland and Asmara Pelupessy (Eds.)

Start with a think-tank approach to the question of how photography in a post-colonial world can “fix” cultural identity. Turn the idea into a multi-platform symposium and exhibition involving a multicultural group of artists of color. The result is this multi-layered exhibition catalogcum- reader that explores the elusive “truth” of photography and its relationship to ethnicity, culture and identity. The book includes essays on cultural identity and photographic representation as well as exhibition documentation with color plates, installation views and graphics. Featured artists include Charif Benhelima and Otobong Nkanga; contributors include Kobena Mercer and Pamela Pattynama.

Add to your order

Anouhka Van Velzen

Tools of Belief

Add to your order

VÉRONIQUE BOURGOIN

Add to your order

MARIEKEN VERHEYEN

Elsewhere

Add to your order

MÉLANIE VEUILLET

Tools of Disobedience

Tools of Disobedience presents 185 photographs shot by Swiss photographer Mélanie Veuillet (b. 1989) in 2014 at prisons in Romandy, the French-speaking part of Switzerland. This monograph depicts items that the inmates secretly made in their cells using the crudest of tools and materials—and which were subsequently confiscated. The makeshift objects are often functional replicas of objects in daily use outside the prison walls. The available materials were altered, combined and repurposed, thereby subverting their original function to become something new, endowed with new properties. The objects often look simpler and more essential than their “normal” counterparts; while often quite different in appearance, they are always functional. Photographed on location by Veuillet in a formal, archival style under neutral artificial lighting, they look like industrial products photographed for advertising purposes. In their hybrid nature, these objects form a sort of page-by-page visual lexicon of the peculiar and yet familiar, the profound and the highly subjective.”

Add to your order

VISA POUR L’IMAGE

Perpignan 2008

Add to your order

Alexandra Vogt

The Dim Feet of White-Maned Desires

Add to your order

CAROLA VOGT & PETER BOERBOOM

Adventureland

Artist couple Carola Vogt and Peter Boerboom have perused their extensive archive of nature-based photography to create an eye-opening journey into the contemporary redefinition of the “great outdoors.” In Adventureland, the two visualize the intertwining of current corporate bonding retreats with the classic romanticism of the German forest. By restaging their picturesque deep-woods settings with woodland experience trails and high-ropes courses, they foster a sense of the uncanny while also connecting contemporary leisure culture to its roots in a 19th-century fetishization of nature. Vogt and Boerboom actively exhibit in their native Germany and Austria and have shown internationally at Art in General, New York. With texts by photo historian Gabriele Conrath-Scholl and Daniela Roth.

Add to your order

VRAI OU FAUX?

Véronique Bourgoin

Between 2010 and 2013, artist and photographer Véronique Bourgoin staged a series of sensory disorienting, Surrealist-influenced installations at the Netherlands Fotomuseum that went on to travel to Hamburg, Vienna, Arles and Istanbul. The museum walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling, black and white trompe l’oeil blow-ups of 19th-century interiors—Art Nouveau lounges and Rococo dressing rooms with brocade wallpaper and heavy drapery. Over this impressive display, Bourgoin installed, salon-style, reproductions of artworks and photographs selected from each participating museum’s collection. Like the shock experienced when photography was invented, viewers experience anew the tension between “being there“ and “not being there.” The entire event is brilliantly documented with two publications; a formal Victorian-styled family album and an oversized unbound newspaper. Included is an essay by Ursula Panhans-Bühler and an interview with the artist by Bernard Marcadé.

Add to your order

SERGEJ VUTUC

Something in Between

It’s a surprise to see ultra-rad skateboard culture clothing manufacturer Carhartt underwriting an exhibition catalog of fine photography – except when the artist is skateboard punk chronicler and performance artist Sergej Vutuc. The young Bosnian artist started skateboarding before he was 10, using improvised equipment on the streets of the former Yugoslavia. Whether he’s following young skaters or elderly dancers on the streets of Germany or Pittsburg, he chronicles his surroundings with rare empathy in dynamic black and white photos. He doesn’t hesitate to scratch his prints, interfere with images, let things go blurry; it’s all part of the improvisational feel. Says Vutuc, “Tom Waits make me feel common. Make dead city more nice.”

Add to your order