The results of the 2011 International Fashion and Photography Festival in Hyères must be written in plural, and with a feminine touch. The jury gathered on Sunday May 1st and the Photographic Prize was awarded to the young Dutch Anouk Kruithof for her work titled The Daily Exhaustion. A special mention was also given to the Swedish artist Katarina Elvén for her series Boxes, Stones And Other Objects.
30 year old Anouk Kruithof studied photography at the St Joost Academy of Art in Breda. She settled in the German capital following an artist’s residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in 2008 and 2009. The award-winning work in the Hyères festival The Daily Exhaustion is a small newspaper of around 50 pages containing 23 self-portraits of an obsessed workaholic artist who has reached a state of exhaustion. Through its pages, the reader discovers a gradual color spectrum, translating the stratification of human energy. The portrait is printed horizontally on a double page, with the binding cutting the inferior part of the face, provoking a voluntary deformation of the image. Other pictures have been composed using two different images forming thus a puzzling object in the hands of the observer…
Katarina Elvén was born in 1972 in Sweden. After having studied set design at the School of Design in Denmark, she began studying photography at the University of Gothenburg where she graduated with a masters in art and architecture. With the series Boxes, Stones And Other Objects, the artist tries to tackle the visual representations of the object and the ambiguous relationship between image and object, with an aesthetics that reminds us of the advertising photography of the 1920’s and 30’s. “I am interested in how we read and interpret images, how pictures produce value and manufacture myths. Using film and photography, I explore questions about aesthetics, surface and style, how the construction of the image is used to provoke feelings such as desire or a sense of uncanniness. I am also interested in photography as a technical medium, with its conventions and limitations.”
