Each year during the Rencontres d’Arles Festival, The HSBC Photography awards presents the two monographs of the winners of the year in the Actes Sud bookstore.
And now, the second exhibition of the HSBC Prize for Photography 2016 is opened in the town of Mougins in the South of France. Throughout the summer, under the artistic guidance of Diane Dufour, the two award winners, Marta Zgierska and Christian Vium, will be presenting their work at the Musée de la Photographie André Villiers and at the Galerie Sintitulo. This exhibition follows the inaugural presentation of their work which took place in Paris at the Esther Woerderhoff Gallery, and is going to circulate around France until December, culminating with a presentation of new works produced throughout the year, with the support of the HSBC.
On this occasion, and for each new exhibition, the two photographers choose one photograph and offer us an interpretation of the work selected from the exhibition.
« Sans Titre (the hand) » from Post series by Marta Zgierska
This particular photograph play with the idea of performance art. The Image is only the final step of a whole process. I was working with my body, looking for a border. Not so much was I looking for the border of pain, but more for the border of fear.
the contact of a knife, incision in my own skin, the hand marked by a trickle of blood becomes the medium of universal fear. Surprisingly we don’t even shudder. This image is purely aesthetic. Liminal experience in laboratory condition. Paradox.
As for me this photography says “Stop. Stop and watch.” Like hypnosis. You can see a little path, the lines of the hand – the path of life. You crave for it to be thicker, longer, better marked.
Assemblage #4 from The Nomadic City series by Christian Vium.
This image (“Assemblage #4”) is a montage made specifically for the exhibition at the Musée de la Photographie André Villers in Mougins. The project ‘Ville Nomade’ represents an on-going laboratory, in which the individual elements (my photographs, archive material, unreleased documents , maps, newspaper articles and so forth) can be assembled in infinite ways to create narrative montages depending on the space in which they are exhibited. In this manner, the project draws attention to the constructed nature of history, composed of fragments that will make sens through practices of montage and assemblage.
In this particular assemblage, a pluviometric map charting the deficit of rainfall in Mauritania during the last years of the great Sahelian droughts in the mid early 1980s forms the backdrop, upon which a variety of images are superimposed. To the left a recent photograph I made in 2014 of a mosquito net and a mattress in a sparsely decorated bedroom in the poor neighbourhood of El Mina. Below, a frame grab appropriated from a documentary about the city of Nouakchott produced for the 20th anniversary of the independence, shows a group of former nomads installing a wooden ‘baraque’ on the outskirts of Nouakchott in the wake of the first droughts of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The portrait of the young couple in the middle stems from the private photo album of an acquaintance in Nouakchott. It dates from the early 1990s. To me, the portrait displays a wonderful mixture of tenderness and timidness. It also contains interesting references to style and thus to aspirations and self-representation. The image on the right is a recent photography I made in 2011 on the outskirts of the constantly expanding city. Hence, this particular assemblage is the synthesis of the story of Nouakchott a montage of past and present, by identifying a number of cardinal themes that affect and characterize this ‘nomadic city’.
Individually, the elements have their own meanings, but when assembled, they constitute a sequence, which forms part of what I call an ‘ethnographic cartography’ of the city of Nouakchott. Each of the images I produce are GPS logged, making it possible to find the exact place in the future and thus identify changes in the urban landscape over time. ‘Ville Nomade’, then, is my attempt at producing an archive of the city of Nouakchott for future generations.
EXHIBTION
Prix HSBC pour la Photographie 2016
Marta Zgierska & Christian Vium
From June 24th to August 28th, 2016
• Musée de la Photographie André Villers
Porte Sarrazine
• Galerie Sintitulo
10 rue Commandeur
06250 Mougins
France
+33 (0)9 51 51 24 50
http://www.mougins-tourisme.fr/fr/content/le-musée-de-la-photographie-andré-villers-0
http://www.galeriesintitulo.fr
http://prixhsbc.evenium.com
BOOKS
• Marta Zgierska – Post
Prix HSBC pour la photographie 2016
Actes Sud
Release : July, 2016
22,0 x 28cm / 96 pages
ISBN 978-2-330-06305-4
20€
http://www.actes-sud.fr
• Christian Vium – Ville Nomade
Prix HSBC pour la photographie 2016
Actes Sud
Release : July, 2016
22,0 x 28cm / 96 pages
ISBN 978-2-330-06304-7
20€
http://www.actes-sud.fr
