The Unseen Eye got himself invited to the Unseen Photo Fair in Amsterdam, and here is his journal of 4 well spent days.
Day 1 – Thursday 21 September
The Unseen Eye went to the debut edition of Unseen in 2011 and had been anxious to make a return visit. Now in its 6th year, Unseen is stewarded by the dazzling Emilia van Lyden and her team, a new Business Director Sean Farran with Valentina Salmeria-Bijzet, Head of Development & External Relations in charge of VIP relations and Anne Rugt in charge of programming from The Living Room and undoubtedly a dozen other things. Unseen ran from the 21st to 24th of September.
Here are the basics: fifty-three galleries from fourteen countries. It said: “Unseen Amsterdam aspires to provide novel and diverse approaches to engage with photography. The event does this through combining programme elements such as the Fair, CO-OP, the Book Market, the Living Room, The Exhibition, Onsite Projects and City Programme”. The emphasis is on new or emerging talent.
First off, the venue is Westergasfabriek, literally a former gas works, a vintage round brick structure offering a delightful and surprising space in which the galleries are organized into the wedges of an enormous pie, most of them sharing space.
This makes for a very manageable room, limiting the number of art works but guaranteeing real interaction with the dealers and with the artists many of whom were present. Everyone seems to have a wonderful time. Also The Eye finds the idea of only showing only fresh work a sweet challenge. It is marvelous to get a sense that the galleries are risking something about their taste. Also booth size dictates that there are fewer artists and works.
There are lots of attendant activities to Unseen, the highlights of which were the Photo Pleasure Palace curated in an enlightened fashion by Erik Kessels and Thomas Mailaender. Also there were a number of prizes (Unseen Talent) and speakers programs in The Living Room co-curated by the Barbican in London and the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson.
VIP’s had a bounty of off-site activities made available. In particular, The Eye was hosted by the Mondriaan Foundation in the form of Haco de Ridder, their senior project officer international relations. He was tireless, patient, imaginative, as big a fan of the amazing in art as The Eye, and willing to help The Eye saw as much as he could in his fairly brief visit to Amsterdam. Why bother with a schedule when Haco was prepared to take me wherever? Also The Lloyd Hotel is a great and funky spot to stay, always full of people you know; its charm as a former youth prison is mixed.
Unseen is full of life and good cheer, dealers, artists and collectors all gathered to have a uniquely fine time of it.
The Eye’s first activity on Thursday AM was judging The Meijburg Art Commission 2017. The international jury included Wilbert Kannekens (Chairman of the Managing Board of Meijburg & Co, NL) represented by Esther Zandvliet – de Groot, Lady Susan Bright (curator and writer, UK) and myself, all ably managed by Stefanie “Unseen” Hofman. Pasi Orrensalo (Finland) was selected for his proposed large single image, to be centrally hung in the company’s atrium. The other nominees for the Meijburg Art Commission 2017 are: Nico Krijno (South Africa), Yoshinori Mizutani (Japan), Jannemarein Renout and Ton Zwerver (both The Netherlands). The finalists had been nominated and were being shown by exhibitors at Unseen.
Before the fair formally opened there was a collectors’ luncheon full of familiar colleagues like Zelda Cheatle from the UK and Lars Willumeit who co-curated the Co-op Program at Unseen and introductions to folks like Narda van T’Veer of The Ravestijn Gallery. It was a spirited beginning.
Similarly, the fair was full of old and new dealer friends ranging from the few US gallerists like Danziger represented by Nera Lerner showing Liz Nielsen’s colorful abstractions), Aperture (Kellie McLaughlin debuting a grid of Drew Nicowicz)), Brooklyn’s Red Hook Gallery (Jimmy Moffett making his Dutch debut) and Peggy Sue Amison working at East West. to unfamiliar exhibitors from Iran, China, Japan, Beirut, Mexico and Qatar – truly international.
A visitor could snake their way through the fair following a Möbius Strip come to life or walk the outside circumference or simply turn in place at the center. You seemed to constantly re-encounter the various stands, although walking clock-wise seemed to reveal itself completely different from counter-clockwise. Finding an exit seemed impossible.
There was great energy. It was fun!
Specifically, the Eye was engaged by Andrei Boyer’s wall-scapes at Clementine de la Feronniere, Todd Hido’s Motel at Galerie Alex Daniels, Andreas Gefeller’s new plant “constructions” and Jacqueline Hassink at Galerie Wouter van Leeuwen, Alejandro Guijarro’s Quantum physics black boards at Tristan Hoare, Maisie Cousins at TJ Boulting with Hannah Watson, Rogier Houwen at Kahlman and Ester Teichmann at Flowers with Chris Littlewood. Dealers and artists were all anxious to show off their wares.
The Eye left before the general flood of public came in and went off to visit Krzysztof Candrowicz’s introduction to next year’s Hamburg Triennial Two Boats Project, a floating photographic platform moored closer to the center of Amsterdam. Artists Claudius Schulze & Maciej Markowicz built their boats by hand then journeyed from Berlin and after Amsterdam will travel slowly to Paris Photo and ultimately Hamburg. Markowicz’ barge is a moving camera obscure. Full disclosure, The Eye will be hosting an UN-Conference at the Triennial next June in Hamburg.
It was a very full and spirited beginning.
Day 2 – Friday, 22 September 2017
The day began with “Unseen and Unknown” a program developed by Rebecca Senf for the Phoenix Art Museum. Becky’s main job lately has been Chief Curator and interim director at The Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. But every year she invites a photography notable to Phoenix to deliver “The Ten Most Exciting Photographers I Learned About Last Year”. The Eye persuaded Unseen to refashion the program with six people doing five photographers each. The presenters included The Eye, Lady Susan Bright, Ms. Senf and Simon Karlstetter, Krzysztof Candrowicz, and Simindokht Dehghani, Owner and Director Ag Galerie, in Tehran, Iran, a welcome addition to any program like this.
Taco had suggested a studio visit to Vivienne Sassen, who is The Netherlands major young art star, and off we went. The Eye had misunderstood my host, Haco de Ridder’s plan, thinking we were going to some artist whose name sounded vaguely like Fifi la Flou. What a sweet surprise. Sassen was great company, talking about her career, its beginnings and her lively life in art, making a transition from a career in front of the camera to behind it. Light, bright and memorable. She was beguiling.
The Eye will always hold FOAM close to his heart because they hosted my OOG (EYE) exhibition there in 2014. We visited their FOAM Talent 2017, this being the first time that annual show has been on view at its home venue. “Selected through the annual Talent Call – the largest to date, with one thousand seven hundred and ninety submissions from seventy-five different countries – the twenty image-makers presented in this exhibition represent a cross section of the current state of photography”. The remarkable Marloes Krijnen with Marcel Feil have lead FOAM brilliantly since its founding in 2001.
We also squeezed in a visit with the indomitable, vibrant Shirley den Hartog who is the great Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf’s studio manager. He would tell you there would be no Erwin without Shirley.
There was an exceptional evening event at Choux Restaurant, a VIP Collectors Dinner. I had to blow off the Meijburg Art Commission dinner which was going to be in Dutch, and it meant I would miss Erwin Olaf’s keynote talk. Collector dinners can be stultifying, dreary events, but this one was animated and friendly. The Eye totally lucked out being seated next to Lucy Conticello, Editor in Chief at M, Le Monde, and Unseen Advisory Committee member, on my left and Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandwoska from the Centre Pompidou, on my right. Other guests included my buddy Simon Baker, from the Tate and Alona Pardo from the Barbican. Nigel Bagley, NL-based collector originally from the UK and curator/writer/collector and man of the world Alistair Hicks, got the conversation rolling after the meal encouraging people to speak up about collecting and the fair. Particularly enjoyable were Marieke and Pieter Sanders who transcend any nationality and are truly international. Even Alejandro Martin from Barcelona who seemed intimated by the language barrier at first, seemed to relax as the evening proceeded.
It was the perfect ending.
Day 3 – Saturday, 23 September 2017
The day began with a studio visit to Koos Breukel who is the most highly regarded portrait photographer in The Netherlands. Steven Evans, Executive Director of Houston’s Fotofest came along. Breukel’s photo studio differs very little from other photo studios, a confined space in his residence, with a wooden, large format camera on a tripod, a plain background sheet of seamless and a treasured simple wooden chair from New Guinea. Breukel is wonderfully intense and completely absorbed with his portraiture. We talked and talked and then he made some portraits with The Eye reluctantly taking part (although it was a seductive gesture by the artist to ask the Eye to sign a copy of his book The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious which was thoughtfully resting on the central table when we arrived. Breukel seemed fiercely intent on linking a version of The Eye to the Richard Avedon portrait of Ezra Pound. The results accompany this diary. Thank you to Carlien Huijsmans at the studio.
Then we visited the Stedelijk Museum which was presenting Carlos Motta: The Crossing, a newly commissioned two-part installation of videos and objects by New York-based, Colombian artist. The Crossing’s LGBTQ subjects hail from Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Morocco, Syria, and Pakistan. Directly addressing the camera in confessional style, they discuss their personal histories of persecution, their perilous sea and land crossings, and their encounters with Dutch refugee policies.
Carlos Motta selected the interviewees with the help of the Amsterdam’s “Secret Garden”, which campaigns to improve the life of LGBTQ refugees, supports their asylum applications, and helps them find their way in the Netherlands. The artist first met a larger group of refugees in Amsterdam in August 2016, and recorded the interviews with eleven refugees in an Amsterdam film studio in February 2017. The videos were good looking and a remarkable and melancholy combination of sadness and relief.
Then back to the fair for more. A good fair like Unseen, you can look at over and over. A favorite photo eminence, the publisher of L’Œil, advises that “you must look at everything”.
This was the night of the Open Gallery Walk. There was the promise of Thai food at Galerie Ron Mandos which had on view Mohau Modasikeng’s Passage, also at Unseen, and Anthony Goicolea’s Anonymous, a new series of paintings (graphite and oil on frosted mylar film). Goicolea has made a solid evolution from his early black and white fairy tale suggested photographic self-portraits, on view and somewhat disingenuously described in the press release as his having “achieved fame with seductive photographic arrangements of a gay Jeunesse dorée underpinned by inscrutable, cryptic layers of meaning”. Well, they are seductive and enigmatic so perhaps the Eye should withdraw the criticism.
At the center of Mohau Modasikeng’s Passage is a three-channel video installation, where we are confronted with a young man and two women traveling by boat. They are filmed from above, framed by the boat which fills with water and sinks. Passage was commissioned by the South African department of Arts and Culture for the 57th Venice Biennale. The video was accompanied by large format stills. It was all very well installed.
The Eye wishes he could report on the rest of Open Gallery Night, but the wine was flowing and our host and staff made it too lovely to move on. Thank you. His walk began and ended at Galerie Mandos.
Apologies to the other two dozen galleries that were open.
Day 4 – Sunday 24 September 2017
A sunny beginning to a very fun Sunday and Day 4 with breakfast at The Lloyd with Millie and Jim Casper, editor-in-chief and publisher of LensCulture, the global photography network and online magazine intent on discovering great contemporary photography for a monthly audience of an amazing 1.5 million worldwide. They have relocated to Amsterdam after many years in Paris, and they are the truest champions of photography.
The Eye presented his half hour program of five artists at “Unseeen and Unknown” in The Living Room followed by Krystof Candrowicz. His selections were Azadeh Akhlaghi (IR), David Fathi (FR), Roberto Fernández Ibáñez (UR), Steve Sabella (GR) and Gerald Slota (US), with a mention of Danila Tkachenko (RU), Jan van Leeuwen (NL), Takehishi Shikama (JP), Andre Sauer (GR) and Daniel Costa Garcia (UK), who was featured in the Unseen Magazine. The audiences for this three-day program slowly increased. The program was a smart fit for the show. Wendy Watriss and Fred Baldwin the founders of Fotofest were in attendance. They don’t miss much.
I finally took some time going through Unseen CO-OP, a project space dedicated to photo collectives. The Eye’s favorite is DER GREIF which is a multiplatform enterprise from Germany with Simon Karlstetter, Founder & Artistic Director and Leon Kirchlechner Artistic Director (Print). Their installation of small prints (8 x 6 inches approximately) in a wall measuring twenty-four artists wide by eight artists tall with works for sale starting at 1 euro was a huge hit literally selling out. The Eye acquired Nathan Pearce, Journey with Mask, 2015 #/25 and Johann Husser, Untitled (Our Only True Life is The Future), 2016 #14/25.
The highlight of Day 4 was a visit to the Photo Pleasure Palace and doing the TRUMP JUMP. A portrait of the US president had been transferred on to giant air bag – some synergy there – and anyone could toss themselves on to it and him from a tower about five meters above. This was cathartic and a creative and unexpected use of photography. There were also opportunities to have temporary tattoos applied to your butt and some funny photo ops. This was the product of the mad imagination and ingenuity of Erick Kessels and Thomas Mailaender. It was the perfect complement to the fair.
Later in the afternoon we made our way to Jamie Hawkesworth’s Landscape with Tree exhibition at Huis Marseille. The Eye had met the artist at the Dear Dave stand in THE BOOK STORE area of the fair and found him to be charming and disarmingly young. Whatever reservations The Eye might have had about the exhibition’s potential were quickly relieved by the quality of the photographs and the installation taking advantage of the whole museum. Well done. Here is some of the artist’s statement.
“Photography is a disarmingly subtle act of sensing, then waiting, until a subject reveals itself. It is my chosen medium because of its capacity to intensify what we see, and to capture the unique truths that lie beneath the surface of our encounters. This enduring and patient economy of means channels our shared, multivalent sense of wonder at being present in the world. This exhibition has offered me the daunting but welcome opportunity to think deeply about the bodily experience of photography. I create material photographs, and my full discovery of the colouration and character of each photograph happens in the darkroom. Each of the fourteen gallery spaces here at Huis Marseille has its own character. My aim has been to create a photographic experience in synergy with the architectural setting, and in anticipation of your engagement with the works. There are moments of intimacy, simplicity, and intensity in this exhibition that, without being overtly instructive, mirror the experiences that I’ve had through photography.”
The works on view ranged from his earliest student work at the Preston Bus Depot, some fashion and recent black and white zaftig nudes to his trips to Congo and Antartica. The staff at Huis Marseille was very helpful and engaging.
The Eye made it back to Unseen for its closing moments still trying to see everything. There are two final works the Eye couldn’t resist catching with his I-Phone: Marta Zglerska, Untitled, at Intervalle and Ralf Peters, Shiffle, 2017 at Bernhard Knaus Fine Art.
Thank you Unseen and Amsterdam. Perhaps the Unseen Eye has seen the light or will, at least, return next year to in his ongoing search for it.
W.M. Hunt
W.M. Hunt writes as The Unseen Eye. He is an occasional contributor to L’Œil de la Photographie and was one of its original supporters.
Unseen Amsterdam
September 22-24, 2017
Westergasfabriek
Pazzanistraat 33
1014 DB Amsterdam
Netherlands
The portfolio above is comprised of works by all finalists of the ING Unseen Talent Award 2017.
