Sinziana Velicescu’s work is a minimalist and abstract approach, a modern chronicling of a quiet land surveyor, completely separated of sentimentality. The publication of her series is a documentation of time, bracketed in images of framed surfaces of space.
•
Naeem Mohaiemen
artist / filmmaker
Naeem Mohaiemen’s essays, films and installations are works about the unreliability of memory in many registers: individual, familial, collective and official. His practice is framed by his upbringing in Dhaka in the 1970s and 80s, a time of deep political turbulence in Bangladesh (the former East Pakistan) after a violent separation from Pakistan. These two decades saw the nation’s hopes, initially imbued with socialism and secularism, fade in a succession of military coups and dictatorships. Drawing on the film and video archive and its erasures, both as material and metaphor to revisit the impact of ruptures in history on individuals, Mohaiemen interweaves his family histories with the unofficial record of former Left utopias, in the post-war period framed by decolonization and world socialism.
Throughout Mohaiemen’s work, displacement can be seen in its literal form in the treatment of global histories of post-colonial socialism, with references to migration, exile, geopolitics and buried family secrets across several countries and epochs. The works focus on the margins of major historical events, and shift perspectives towards narrating non-Western histories. ON a metaphorical level, it can be seen in Mohaiemen’s attempt to create new meanings from fragmented testimonies, slips in memory and gaps in the archive, opening the way to fictionalization. His ongoing obsession with the previous century’s struggle between capitalism and socialism, between colony and metropole, between West and non-West, always comes back to this question: what would have been our other possible futures, if events had unfolded differently?
–Elsa Coustou, Assistant Curator, Contemporary British Art, Tate
•
RELATED ARTICLES
-
Interview with Saul LeiterBy David Gibson
“History of art is a history of great things neglected and ignored and mediocre things being admired. At different times things are different. The history of photography is a history of changes.” –Saul Leiter (more…)
-
Helene Schmitz: Thinking Like a MountainDec 14, 2019 – Mar 15, 2020
“I wanted to portray the violent transformation of nature in the European periphery. I have experienced that the concept of wilderness, and virgin land untouched by humans, has disintegrated.” –Helene Schmitz
-
Elimination of ViolenceArt, Women & Awareness
The United Nations General Assembly has designated today International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Today we would like to once again celebrate the women who have inspired and created in the art world.
-
The American Document / Part IIFractured States / Peter van Agtmael
After returning from years of war coverage, Peter van Agtmael tries to piece together the memory, identity, race, class, and family, in a landscape which has become as surreal as the war he left behind.
-
Bruce Conner: BreakawayNov 26, 2019 – Feb 22, 2020
Following presentations of Bruce Conner’s films such as Crossroads (1976) in June 2015, A Movie (1958) in May 2017, and Easter Morning (2008) in Naples, January 2018, Thomas Dane Gallery introduces Breakaway (1966) (more…)
-
Alec Soth at MagnumNov 7, 2019 – Jan 24, 2020
Magnum Gallery Paris presents Alec Soth, an exhibition that features work reaching from Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), the artist’s first monograph, to his latest, I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating (2019).
-
Lucian Freud / The Self PortraitsOct 27, 2019 – Jan 26, 2020
In a world first, we unite Lucian Freud’s self-portraits in one extraordinary exhibition. See more than 50 paintings, prints and drawings in which this modern master of British art turns his unflinching eye firmly on himself.
-
Martin Parr – Early WorksRRB Photobooks
RRB Photobooks & the Martin Parr Foundation are delighted to present Martin Parr – Early Works. The book covers the early part of Parr’s career, comprised of images shot between 1970 and 1984, mainly in the north of England and Ireland. (more…)
