Paris Photo 2024

Top five fair highlights

Selected by Alessandro Merola

Paris Photo, the photography world’s “north star” event, has returned to mark its territory under the vaulted dome of the Grand Palais. It opens a new chapter in the fair’s history, boasting a revised layout, expanded sections, smart curatorial interventions and fresh visual branding. Amidst a growing emphasis on contemporary practice, not to mention multiple Surrealist nods to celebrate the art movement’s 100th birthday, works inspired by the land and city provide much contemplation. Here are five standout displays from the fair’s 27th edition – selected by 1000 Words Assistant Editor, Alessandro Merola.


Alessandro Merola | Fair highlights | 07 Nov 2024 | In association with MPB

1. Mark Ruwedel, Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies
Large Glass Gallery

Orchestrating selections from Mark Ruwedel’s conceptually ambitious and ongoing four-part epic, this installation by Large Glass Gallery delivers an impactful meditation on the fraught relationship between the natural environment and economic expansion, the inevitable consequences of which are never far from view. Various vantage points onto Los Angeles are offered here – from its rivers and canyons to the desert and Western edge – revealing not only the places nature and humanity intersect, but where the artist encounters history. Although Ruwedel is very much committed to, and working through the lineage of, the American New Topographic aesthetic (Ed Ruscha’s gasoline stations and Lewis Baltz’s industrial parks are amongst the seminal works at this edition), his work is not derivative nor daunted by the past (even if it is haunted by it). Seizing in their austere, elemental beauty, these hand-printed pictures quietly draw you in, inviting you to find evidence of human traces on the landscape, whether through a discarded water bottle or old train track that hisses at you as the wind sweeps through its bended edges. There are the blazed trees of Burnt too, a small portfolio Ruwedel made in the aftermath of the 2022 fires. They are as much onlookers to the contesting of wildness as we are.

2. Ester Vonplon, I See Darkness
Galerie S.

The narratives contained within the land are also startlingly evoked in Ester Vonplon’s display with Galerie S., which offers one of the most unique viewing experiences in the reinvented Emergence section upstairs. It comprises new and eye-catching experiments from the series I See Darkness, for which the Swiss artist turned a disused tunnel, once the entrance to the Safien Valley in Switzerland, into a darkroom of sorts, utilising light-sensitive paper to transcribe the alchemical rhythms of darkness, nature and time. Developed across days, sometimes months, the resultant images bear an irresistible range of shapes, colours, textures and moods. Shown here in an appropriately black booth, separated by a 10-metre-long unique piece produced in the tunnel, they appear frail, fleeting yet also lucid, bearing a dreamy density and layering of elements which seems to embolden nature – a nature which Vonplon has indeed let back in. Thus commendable are the ways in which the artist has submitted herself to a collaborative and unpredictable practice that is deeply rooted in her relationship with her local environment. Vonplon sees through it, listens to it, learns from it. Vonplon reminds us to follow suit.

3. Sakiko Nomura, Träumerei
Galerie Écho 119

Galerie Écho 119’s representation of the Sakiko Nomura continues to impress at this small but special solo presentation. It marks the first time the Träumerei series has been exhibited in its entirety outside the Japanese artist’s native country, albeit with selected prints only viewable upon request. There is also the opportunity to experience a delectable portfolio of collotypes, rich in grayscale and deep in jet-black, printed by Benrido this summer. The allure of this work lies in the fact one can enter it at any point, and follow it in any direction, in turn attempting to thread together a loose story through Nomura’s spliced images of skylines, landscapes, flowers, animals and sitters in repose. The combinations tease out tensions between interiority and exteriority, nature and artifice, reality and illusion, yet simultaneously resist any clarity on where the lines are drawn. Nomura’s is a multifaceted world, lit by a pale moon, a dreamwork. No matter how close you get, these vestiges feel somehow distant, wrapped in thought, clouded in a state of reverie. They are the last witnesses of moments that would otherwise be lost forever; or never happened at all.

4. Antony Cairns, E-ink Screens
Intervalle

Making a star turn at Intervalle is Antony Cairns, who, too, probes the realm of (science) fiction. One must crane one’s neck to view the artist’s latest so called “e-ink” works, which are encased in individual Perspex boxes. Here, Cairns has hacked into, and uploaded images onto, e-readers, subsequently fixing ink – or, indeed, trapping time – on the screens. They record urban scenes – architecture, tunnels, signs et cetera – from cities including Shanghai, Tokyo, Los Angeles and London. Although the captions indicate where each image was taken, experienced as a whole, any distinctions between locales collapse under the grimy, gloomy glow of megapolis sky. They turn into the same cities, unknown cities and on-the-brink-of-becoming bygone cities. Whilst Cairns’ practice has a strong affinity with digital technology (he is also launching two limited-edition books at the fair, produced using a RISO machine and Sony’s discontinued Mavica camera, respectively), these images, with their etch-like aesthetic, seem to stretch even further back in time. One feels that the artist is almost stealing from the past to give to the future. There is, of course, something very cynical about his decision to encase the screens behind glass, like remnants, or fossils. Cairns asks: whose utopia now?

5. Denis Malartre, Les Objectales
Bigaignon

Despite the irony of viewing them in a commercial setting, given the ethos of France’s late 1960s Supports/Surfaces school which the late Denis Malartre riffed off, the clinical approaches of the late Parisian photographer make the Bigaignon booth – located in the dynamic Prismes section – a succinct, sensual statement on materiality. Borne out of ‘exasperation’, these 50 pared-down prints from the 1986–88 series Les Objectales, elegantly mounted in white-wooden frames, depict bits of paper affixed to the corners of a Parisian apartment, as well as strips hanging from the ceiling. The depth of field is shallow and the focus is minimal, bringing to attention the interplay and paradoxes of light and shadow – that is, the latter existing only in the presence of the former, yet defined by its complete absence. They are, simply and deconstructed, a set of formal orientations across surfaces, revealing not only the medium’s physicality and fabrication, but also, somehow, its aura. With these highly portable, repeatable image-objects implying infinite reiterations, we find Malartre’s fixation with photography above all else. ♦

Paris Photo
runs at the Grand Palais until 10 November 2024.

 

 

 

 


Alessandro Merola is Assistant Editor at 1000 Words.

Images:

1- Mark Ruwedel, “Sunken City” (2017), from Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies. Courtesy Large Glass Gallery

2-Mark Ruwedel, “Big Tujunga Wash #15” (2018), from Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies. Courtesy Large Glass Gallery

3>5-Ester Vonplon, “Untitled” (2024), from I See Darkness. Courtesy Galerie S.

6>7-Sakiko Nomura, “Untitled” (2017), from Träumerei. Courtesy Akio Nagasawa Gallery and Galerie Écho 119

8-Antony Cairns, “LDN4 #20” (2024), from E-ink Screens. Courtesy Intervalle

9-Antony Cairns, “TYO2, MAVICA #107” (2024), from MaViCa CTY (Mörel Books, 2024). Courtesy Mörel Books

10>11-Denis Malartre, “Untitled” (1988), from Les Objectales. Courtesy Bigaignon


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The 9th Singapore International Photography Festival

In Search of Lost Time

Festival review by Kong Yen Lin

Loosely inspired by Marcel Proust’s epic modernist classic, The 9th Singapore International Photography Festival, under the title In Search of Lost Time, considers photography as a carrier of both personal and national identities. Featuring FX Harsono’s Keeping the Dream, which confronts ethnic subjugation in Indonesia through archival portraits of Chinese Indonesian children; Liu Bolin’s Seeing the Invisible, presenting staged self-portraits that merge him with urban landscapes; and Mingalaba: A Journey Through the Myanmar Photo Archive, curated by Kirti Upadhyaya, which intertwines public and private narratives of Burmese life through family portraits and civilian records. The festival surfaces involuntary gaps in history, memory and documentation, holding a mirror up to the process of self-examination itself, Kong Yen Lin writes.


Kong Yen Lin | Festival review | 31 Oct 2024

Interposed between physical reality and representation, photographs are often carriers of biographies, be it the self or the nation, which germinate in varying social contexts bearing new meanings for their beholders. The biennial Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF) is an intensification of this capacity for introspection. In surfacing photography’s layered possibilities vis-à-vis the medium’s manifestations as photobook, research data, archival records, and vernacular keepsakes, it prompts deeper thought about the sociocultural fabric of Singapore and our ever- changing identities in an age where visibility, memory, time and space are constantly being redefined.

Framed by a curatorial direction loosely inspired by Marcel Proust’s epic modernist classic In Search of Lost Time (1913), bodies of works presented similarly grappled with the protean nature of memory as frozen or compressible, allowing revisiting and reflection, or fluid and meandering, changing and reshaping as new interpretations are added to them.

A fitting primer to the festival is Keeping the Dream, a festival commission featuring Indonesian contemporary artist FX Harsono, which asserted the inherent violence in photography when being deployed as an apparatus for ethnic profiling and subjugation. Known for his politically charged works which examine identity through a personal lens, Harsono critiques the long-standing institutional discrimination and oppression of the Chinese minority community in Indonesia (of which he is a member). Taking centerstage is a typology of over 100 archival facial portraits showing anonymous Chinese Indonesian children, ranging from toddlers to pre-teens, extracted from official identification documents dating from early to late 1990s which he had been salvaging since a decade ago. They allude to state policies during Former President Suharto’s New Order regime that required ethnic Chinese Indonesians to undergo onerous proof of citizenship, as well as measures which suppressed the expression of Chinese identity, such as banning the public use of Chinese names and forcing civilians to adopt Indonesian ones.

Together with a series of photo assemblages juxtaposing ID documents with found images of familial bliss, Harsono projects his imagination of a childhood unfettered by prejudice and surveillance that might have elided most children of that generation. The absence of textual labels providing translation support for the documents rendered in Dutch or Bahasa Indonesia, echo the silences of a community facing erasure. Yet the artist’s act of resurfacing these records and reinterpreting them with personal interventions stood in defiance of this painful period in history from being forgotten. Reflecting on the Singaporean context, a city state with a population comprising 76 percent ethnic Chinese, the governance of Chinese identity, language and culture had also been instrumentalised and calibrated to balance delicate geopolitics of its position within the Malay Archipelago, and the need to remain connected to China’s economic success.

The exploration of identity as a sociopolitical construct continues in Seeing the Invisible, a solo exhibition by Chinese artist Liu Bolin featuring 11 works from his ongoing Hiding in the City and Target series. Conceived using painting, performance and photography, these staged self-portraits depict Bolin literally blending into the backdrops of selected landscapes. Adopting the visual metaphor of invisibility, they provoke thought on the marginality of identity and memory arising from tensions between insider and outsider, individualism and collectivism. While Bolin’s impetus to begin Hiding in the City originated in 2005 as personal protest sparked by the government’s forced demolition of his artist studio in preparations for the Beijing Olympics, over the years, his choice of canvases and collaborators have come to reflect a far-ranging humanistic concern. For one, Cancer Village (2013) involved the artist collaborating with over 20 villagers in Shandong province facing the threat of downstream industrial pollution, to stage an act of camouflage against a desolate wheat field, with the aim of raising awareness around the social costs of economic progress. As part of a festival commission, Bolin had also created two new site-specific artworks in Singapore, poised against the touristic landmark of the Merlion Park and a bustling Hawker Center in Chinatown.  

The latter was particularly meaningful for Bolin, who felt it “embodied the historical lineage of Chinese migration across the world” [1]. His profile as a Chinese artist intermingles with the cultural politics of Singapore’s Chinatown, which is an anomaly from most Chinatowns in the world typically catered for the Chinese minority of the populace. During 19th to mid-20th Century British colonial rule, Chinatown was a self-sustaining ethnic enclave demarcated for incoming Chinese immigrants. However, in post-colonial Singapore, its significance evolved to embrace the nation’s multicultural outlook, and developed into a site of active discourse on gentrification and heritage preservation. With globalisation, complexities of identity, memory, and integration came into sharp relief when Chinatown relived its role as a point of congregation for the post-1990 wave of new Chinese immigrants to Singapore [2]. Furthermore, hawker centres are also unique social spaces in Singapore that stand for the melting pot of diverse food cultures.

Expanding this dialogue with the cultural politics of space was Mingalaba: A Journey Through the Myanmar Photo Archive  မင်္ဂလာပါ: မြန်မာ့ဓာတ်ပုံမော်ကွန်း၏ဖြတ်သန်းခြင်းခရီး , a photographic display curated by Kirti Upadhyaya. Inserted into shop displays, advertisement niches and restaurant walls across a cluster of malls in the city’s central district, doubling up as bustling enclaves for the sizeable Burmese community in Singapore, the archival images represent a historical counterpoint against the flux of activities in the spaces. The mix of images ranging from mid to late 20th Century vernacular snapshots, family photos, studio portraits, and civilian records of national milestones such as the first independence speech in Yangon in 1948, not only crisscross terrains of personal and social memory, but also blur boundaries between the private and public. Collections by two of the earliest local photographers U Than Maung and U Aung San were especially captivating, offering a rare glimpse into identity formation and self-fashioning in post-colonial Myanmar.

The Myanmar Photo Archive was founded almost a decade ago by Austrian photographer Lukas Birk when Myanmar was loosening up from decades of oppressive military rule, with the aim of creating a repository of social and personal memory. The display posits deeper contemplation on the photograph as a construct of contextual interpretation, and its role in historical imagination and retelling. Within Yangon’s highly restricted and fraught media landscape, it entails greater democratic access to the past, though navigating with silences, absences and information gaps remains a perennial challenge.

This atomising of the stream of life into discrete, manageable elements to be collected, saved and shared, extends beyond traditional archives into the virtual multiverse of social media, as examined in Pierfrancesco Celada’s solo exhibition. It comprised three bodies of works When I feel down I take a train to the Happy Valley, One a Day and Instagrampier, which were executed in tandem during the time he lived in Hong Kong from 2014 to 2022. Bearing witness to recent momentous events in the city such as the Umbrella Movement and the global pandemic, Celada poses an observation into psychosocial realities of one of the world’s most densely populated urban metropolises. His approach is gently curious and non-didactic. Images seized from spontaneous moments on the streets, appear enigmatic and open-ended, inviting audiences to project their own interpretations. Instagrampier (2016-2021), a series which unfolded within a cargo pier on the west side of Hong Kong island, stood out in particular for its wry take on how the gaze of content sharing platforms such as Instagram, imposes a visual logic to the world of images through approval metrics. While initially setting out to document the constant streams of Instagrammers posing for selfies at sunset with similar stances and antics, Celada soon found himself caught in the loop of repeating the same ritual of recording others record themselves. “My works are self-portraitures of how I lived,” he said in an interview [3]. This calls to mind theorist Nathan Jurgenson’s remark of the social photo as ‘a documentary consciousness that turns users into a tourist of their own experience’ [4].

The power of the photographic gaze to objectify, possess, and turn life into something relatable and consumable is explored through Garden City: Remix Edition, a collaborative project by DECK and ArtSpace LUMOS that features four photographers – Woong Soak Teng and Marvin Tang from Singapore as well as Kim Sunik and Lee Jin Kyung from South Korea. The exhibition appraises the dialectics between humans and nature in urban living environments, and the many contestations and contradictions that arise from our ambition to document, tame, and co-exist with the natural world. Dialogues that arise between the works ultimately point towards the embodied experience of nature and the inseparability between nature and culture. By contemplating how ecological relationships are in fact socially constituted, the show summons deeper consideration on the types of attachment and values that undergird the relations one has with the self and with others.

Collectively, the festival surfaces involuntary gaps in history, memory and documentation, holding a mirror up to the process of self-examination itself. It reinforces the ever-critical role of art and photography to liberate from the buried world of spent consciousness, the many alternate pathways to the future to which habit has made us blind. ♦

Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF) runs until 24 November 2024.


Kong Yen Lin is Assistant Curator, the National Museum of Singapore. Aside from her professional practice, she is a researcher and writer focusing on Singapore’s modern photography history from the 1950s to 80s, with an interest in examining the wider systemic frameworks governing the development of visual culture.

References:

[1] Interview with the author, 16 October 2024.

[2] Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Lily Kong, “Singapore’s Chinatown: Nation building and heritage tourism in a multiracial city” in Localities, Volume 2, 2012. https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/2250, [accessed 27 October 2024].

[3] Interview with the author, 25 October 2024.

[4] Nathan Jurgenson, The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (London & New York: Verso, 2020).

Images:

1-FX Harsono, Keeping the Dream No.3, 2024.

2- Installation view of FX Harsono,  Keeping the Dream No.3. © Toni Cuhadi. Courtesy Singapore International Photography Festival and DECK. 

3-Liu Bolin, Chinatown. Performance: 11-22 October 2024.

4-Liu Bolin, Chinatown Complex Hawker Centre. Performance: 11-22 October 2024.

5>7-Liu Bolin, Merlion Park. Performance: 11-22 October 2024.

8>10-The Myanmar Photo Archive

11>12-Pierfrancesco Celada, Instagrampier, 2021.

13-Pierfrancesco Celada, When I feel down I take a train to the Happy Valley, 2014-2022.

14-Marvin Tang, A Guide to Tree Planting.

15-Kim Sunik, Temporary Garden.

16-Woong Soak Teng, Some Pictures of Representation, 2018.


1000 Words favourites

• Renée Mussai on exhibitions as sites of dialogue, critique, and activism.

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age.

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect.

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries.

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto.

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous R. Dahmani.