BERTIEN VAN MANEN – BEYOND MAPS AND ATLASES

Posted on 2016-02-29

“At first, working in Ireland I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. My husband had died. I dispensed with the people and reflected on the atmosphere. I was guided by a feeling and a search, a longing for some kind of meaning in a place of myths and legends.”

Bertien van Manen, September 2015.

This is the artist’s first body of work produced in Ireland and traces her journey across the island over the past year and a half. During her visits she stayed in the homes of strangers, mostly other photographers living across Ireland, who became friends with van Manen and made work alongside the artist. While travelling she became immersed in Irish literature and was guided by the words and landscapes of Seamus Heaney, John Banville and John McGahern as much as the people she travelled with.

Bertien van Manen is known for her poetic and intuitive style of photography, capturing intimate and spontaneous moments on a simple snapshot camera. Relying on chance encounters and accidental discoveries van Manen portrays an Irish landscape that is at times otherworldly in its beauty and raw in its savagery. She penetrates the private worlds of her subjects and renders contemporary Ireland as a place shrouded in mist and ghosts.

Exhibition runs through till March 19th, 2016

Belfast Exposed Photography
The Exchange Place
23 Donegall Street
BT1 2FF
Belfast

www.belfastexposed.org

  

JENNY KALLMAN – SHUTTER

Posted on 2016-02-29

Staged scenes using water, mirrors and flash to disrupt space and jar the narrative conformity. For the first time Källman is using double exposure when making the image (e.g. Water Park, Light Shot Hole) shifting the spatial and temporal nature of the work. These are no longer ‘moments’ or ‘places’, they are events and spaces. The images become placeless and magical. Källman’s photographs her studio, night time streets, teenagers on their phones, bits of paper. These banalities are difficult to place in the works and the works are difficult to place back into the banality of the world in which they were taken.

In other single exposure works in the show similar magical shifts occur. The photographs in the second room disrupt identity. Mirrors and flash, which would ordinarily reveal identity and detail are used here to mask and deflect. What should be a self portrait in Signal Vision is a photograph of a teenage girl. The overly familiar self absorption of the teenage image maker is dislocated and the photographer disappears, leaving the viewer in her place. We become the mirror.

Opposite – A Kind of Room, 2016

Exhibition runs through till April 2nd, 2016

David Risley Gallery
Bispevej 29
2400
Copenhagen
Denmark

www.davidrisleygallery.com

  

ANNE-LISE COSTE

Posted on 2016-02-29

“L’art de la joie” (The Art of Joy), is also the title of a flower still life in the show, and is taken from the literary masterpiece by the Italian author and actress Goliarda Sapienza. The book, written in the years 1967-1976, was published only after the death of the author in 1988. Last year, a brand new French translation gave Anne-Lise Coste, who is an avid reader, inspiration to some of the new works presented in this Stuttgart show. Like the author Goliarda, the heroine of the book has an unusual name: Modesta. She comes from a very poor background and marries into the top of the Italian nobility. Modesta’s formidable character and high social status gives her the power to rebel against the rigid constraints of Sicilian nobility, and to say, do and think exactly what she feels like with an authenticity and integrity, which is also characteristic of Coste.

The personality of the artist is present in every single work she makes: “It’s always me” Coste would say when describing people, places and situations depicted in her compositions. Since the very beginning of Coste’s career, the role of the female artist in an overwhelmingly male dominated environment and the permanent battle for visibility has been a theme expressed in her work, subtly or forcefully. In this show presenting primarily recent and exuberantly colourful works on paper, but also some calligraphic paintings from the end of her New York years, a group of works is called ”writings and other forms of life“. In it, ideas and feelings looking for explanation or expressing frustration with the state of things come to life through text fragments and poetic calligraphic patterns. Political and personal, intimate matters like loneliness and self-criticism are often expressed within the same composition. But also joy, enthusiasm, passion, hope and humour – the whole spectrum of authentic emotion. There is no adherence to rules or constraints of stylistic or technical nature.

Opposite – L’Art de la joie, 2016

Exhibition runs through till March 24th, 2016

Galerie Reinhard Hauff
Paulinenstrasse 47
70178 Stuttgart
Germany

www.xavierhufkens.com

  

NEXT TO HER

Posted on 2016-02-29

Chelli is raising her mentally disabled sister Gabby all by herself. When the social worker finds out she leaves her sister alone in the house while at work, Chelli is forced to place her in a day-care center and the void left by her sister’s absence makes room for a man in her life.
That man, Zohar, tears another crack in the symbiotic relationship of the two sisters.

In theatres March 11th, 2016

www.2teamproductions.com

  

THE WITCH

Posted on 2016-02-24

New England, 1630. Upon threat of banishment by the church, an English farmer leaves his colonial plantation, relocating his wife and five children to a remote plot of land on the edge of an ominous forest — within which lurks an unknown evil. Strange and unsettling things begin to happen almost immediately — animals turn malevolent, crops fail, and one child disappears as another becomes seemingly possessed by an evil spirit. With suspicion and paranoia mounting, family members accuse teenage daughter Thomasin of witchcraft, charges she adamantly denies. As circumstances grow more treacherous, each family member’s faith, loyalty and love become tested in shocking and unforgettable ways.

In theatres March 11th, 2016

a24films.com

  

AITOR ORTIZ

Posted on 2016-02-22

Beyond the documental photography of architecture, and asserting the dilution factor and transmutation of reality that is associated with photographic representation, Aitor Ortiz works with space, architecture and objects as opening elements to introduce a number of visual and cognitive unknowns.

His interest persistently raises a series of dilemmas between representation and interpretation (perception) while establishing a relationship between the content of his images, the physical properties of the materials on which he reproduces his works and their physical position in an exhibition. That’s why Aitor Ortiz is trying to establish a broad spectrum of work process and a relationships between photographed places, the conscious and unconscious mechanisms involved in the process of image manipulation: the eye (interpretation, frame, contextualisation, …), the camera (focus / blur, optical distortion, motion transmission, …), and the brain (the limitations of an imperfect device in the interpretation of data and empirical skills: experience, association of concepts ..) that culminate in the exhibition space; where physical experience again transcends the content of his photographs as part of a process of constant interaction between their representation and the viewer’s perception.

Opposite – Millau 007, 2008

Exhibition runs through till May 1st, 2016

Galerie Springer Berlin
Fasanenstrasse 13
10623 Berlin
Germany

www.galeriespringer.de