Albumen Gallery at UNSEEN Amsterdam (Booth 37)
This year, Albumen Gallery will host four artists, Robert Conrad, Steven Seidenberg, Robert Kemnitz and Edmund Sumner. Each artist’s work will depict the documentation and celebration of architecture, in particular, an exploration of abandoned buildings and their silent, often ghostly representation of urban decay and rural abandonment
Robert Conrad (Ger) 1962-2023 (images 1-3)
Robert Conrad’s photographs are cultural anchors, each photo a defiant act of preserving old things from disappearing – capturing dilapidated buildings as a form of protest against forgetting history. For a large part of his life, Conrad was based in Berlin and his photographs of abandoned buildings have been recognised as a sharp socio-commentary on the life once lived within a totalitarian Communist state.
Repurposing aesthetics of urban decay and celebrating their cultural significance, Conrad’s matter of fact documentary approach offers a powerful and visual commentary. An act of resistance and historical cultural preservation, the architecture is used as a prism through which he observes and reflects on the world around him and the past we leave behind. This will be the first public showing of Conrad’s work since his death in 2023.
Steven Seidenberg (US) 1967 (images 4-6)
American photographer & author Steven Seidenberg explores the landscapes, material culture, and remaining structures of the Italian government’s 1952 land reform policy known as the Riforma Fondiaria. Between 1952 and 1972, the Italian government implemented a land reform policy in a few key agrarian centres of the countryside that was funded by the Marshall Plan. The programme placed land in the possession of impoverished families, but did so without the infrastructure necessary to make the small holdings sustainable. This then brought about a mass migration into the developing industrial North, leaving dozens upon dozens of post-war, often cast-concrete structures abandoned in the now machine cultivated fields. In 2017, photographer Steven Seidenberg began exploring the vast rural landscapes of Basilicata and Puglia and this selection of work portrays the stagnate silence and ghostly abandonment of areas left behind after the failed renovational program.
Thomas Kemnitz (Ger) 1966 (images 7-9)
Thomas Kemnitz’s photographs of abandoned architecture are the end result of meticulously researched projects. Far from indulging in a romanticism of ruins, his photos set out to achieve a number of things. In the first instance, they capture a building or site in the state it ceased to be used. At the same time the images are composed and structured as part of their location and surroundings, which invites the viewer to reflect on the historical and geographical context. The aim of Thomas Kemnitz’s visual exploration and documentation is to do justice to the object: targeted research and responsible publication are at the beginning of a process that does not lose sight of the context and ultimately contributes to the media preservation of the place through reflection and communication hand in hand.
Edmund Sumner (UK) (images 10-11)
Edmund Sumner is an international and highly regarded architecture photographer. For over 20 years his work has been commissioned by leading architects, publishers, editors and curators, who value the quality of his work distilling and conveying the character and essence of buildings and interior space and that his work transcends any functional and technical remit. Alongside commissioned work, Edmund Sumner has built up an impressive body of private artistic work continuously exploring the principle and potential of architecture photography as ‘the test of time frozen’. Sumner’s images set markers and milestones highlighting how humans, through cultural and industrial activities – for better and for worse – shape the landscape; and simultaneously are shaped by the landscape.
Albumen Gallery
London
www.albumen-gallery.com
ANNET GELINK GALLERY Amsterdam – Ed van der Elsken, Bertien van Manen, & Robby Müller
Annet Gelink Gallery is presenting a presentation focused on the Estates of Ed van der Elsken, Bertien van Manen, and Robby Müller. The selection will feature newly released editions of Ed van der Elsken’s work, never shown before, alongside Robby Müller’s still lifes from his vast archive of Polaroids, including a new edition released on the occasion of the fair. Of Bertien van Manen, we will present a curated selection of photographs from her latest exhibitions, coinciding with the publication of I Am the Only Woman There (Fw: Books, Amsterdam, 2024), a reprint of the 1979 Vrouwen te Gast.
Ed van der Elsken (The Netherlands)1925-1990 (images 12-14)
Enfant terrible of Dutch photography, for over 40 years, Ed van der Elsken 1925-1990 The Netherlands portrayed striking individuals he encountered on his travels. His approach was confrontational, embracing the bright as well as darker sides of human life.
Bertien van Manen (The Netherlands) 1935-2024 (images 15-17)
Bertien van Manen) is known for her intimate, detailed portraits of life as others live it. She has documented the daily life of various social groups such as nuns, female migrant workers, and mining communities in the Appalachian Mountains, as well as life in the former Soviet Union and China.
Robby Müller (The Netherlands) 1940-2018 (images 18-20)
Widely known as a cinematographer for directors such as Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch, Robby Müller left a vast archive of Polaroids, which he would often take in moments between his work on set, as studies in light and composition. Taken from an experimental standpoint, his Polaroids see Müller exploring the many-faceted relationship between light, camera, and photographer.
ANNET GELINK GALLERY
PL Amsterdam
www.annetgelink.com
Art Gallery o68 Velp The Netherlands: Tony Dočekal, Charlotte Koenen, Louise te Poele
Tony Dočekal (The Netherlands)1992 (images 21-23)
Tony Dočekal’s series ‘The Color of Money and Trees’ examines how identity and success are perceived in the American West, a region often associated with the pursuit of prosperity. Drawing on narratives of the Southwest heard in her youth, and enriched by her work with the unhoused, the series also reflects the connections she formed with people she met along the way. These encounters juxtapose her envisioned dreams with the stark realities she observed while traveling in this region over five years.
Through portraits, street photos, and natural landscapes, the series highlights symbols of freedom in the collective imagination. This introspective journey offers multiple perspectives on the tension between personal aspirations and societal definitions of wealth, reflecting on what it means to find fulfillment and purpose in a world that often values material success over individual authenticity. It connects personal stories to broader themes, challenging conventional notions of home, individuality, and the meaning of prosperity and success.
In line with the theme of ‘Prosperity’, this work explores not only the economic aspects of flourishing but also the personal dimensions, questioning whether prosperity is solely about financial security or if it encompasses a deeper connection to our environment, our communities, and our sense of self.
‘Lyric’ is a portrait of a 9-year-old girl I met at an RV park in Tucson, Arizona, where she lived in a school bus with her family. Her parents sought autonomy and a life away from conventional societal expectations. The brown beans and the golden cutlery play on our perceptions of wealth, while Lyric’s powerful gaze meets yours.
Charlotte Koenen (The Netherlands)1992 (images 24-26)
Charlotte Koenen is an artist whose artistic practice revolves around experimentation with materials, focusing on understanding their transformations. Through her work, Koenen explores the interaction between visible and invisible forces, employing processes such as staining, melting, and exposure to natural elements. Seen in Charlotte’s work is often the residue of an experiment, a wealth of natural forms as a result of the experiment. There is beauty in the imperfection, the incompleteness, the transience. Charlotte’s work is ‘wabi-sabi’, as aesthetics expert Leonard Koren (1948) might say. ‘Restrict everything to the essence, but don’t remove the poetry’. Charlotte Koenen’s work is black, white and everything in between.
At UNSEEN 2024 Charlotte Koenen shows photograms. A photogram is a print of an object placed directly onto photosensitive material in a darkroom and then exposed to light. They are like X-rays of materials, focusing on materiality to create abstract images. We show photograms of planed wood. These bear witness to a making process, remnants of the transition from raw material to refined workmanship.
Louise te Poele (The Netherlands)1984 (images 27-29)
Louise te Poele has an international reputation for her mixed media still-lifes and colorful installations and she recently developed herself as the curator of the Standing on the Shoulders of Giants exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London (8 March – 12 May 2024).
In her body of work and especially in the works at UNSEEN 2024 boundaries are constantly blurred: what are we looking at? A photograph – a painting? She draws her inspiration from contemporary life, where the boundaries between real and fake – between the physical and the virtual are also becoming (more and more) blurred. Often there is a negative connotation around the term fake, but te Poele interrogates in her work: ‘Do we really need everything physically or is a memory of an object also satisfying?’
She uses seemingly ordinary – everyday objects, with which she manages to create a world of wonder. Her work is a plea to look at the world around us with new eyes, to find the extraordinary again in the ordinary. Her vision is: ‘looking at the world around you with those eyes, leads to concentrated attention and ultimately to a caring relationship with the world.’ This is how she gives her perspective on the topic of what we need for prosperity. Her recent work was made during her residency at Collège Néerlandais in Paris in 2023, and is part of the series ‘ An animated Essay’.
Art Gallery o68
6881 SG Velp
www.galleryo68.com
