The Merchant House Amsterdam: Amanda Means (1945, NY) (images 1-3)
Amanda Means is celebrated for her black-and-white gelatin silver prints of palpable materiality. Means’s virtuoso light projections without a camera—made by physically shining light on the development paper—give rise to her evocative, masterly printing technique. The result is a luminous display of everyday objects, such as lightbulbs and water glasses, in an unexpected serial close-up. A 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, awarded for her contribution to contemporary photography, Means is in numerous museum collections, including the Whitney Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. After living in New York City for 35 years, she moved to Beacon (NY) in 2007.
The Merchant House
1016 BV Amsterdam
www.merchanthouse.nl
THIS IS NO FANTASY Melbourne, Victoria, Australia: Ellen Dahl (Norway/ Australia) (images 4-6)
Ellen Dahl’s artistic practice is largely rooted in working with or around the landscape. The concept of photography’s intrinsic involvement in how we see and feel about the world around us underpins her projects. She continually explores the expanded field of the photographic medium and its potential to engage new critical, poetic, and aesthetic ways of assembling ecological meaning and geological imagination. She is also interested in the medium’s relationship to time and often explores this working across photography, video and still-motion, sound, and installation.
Dahl has an ongoing attraction to the concept of the island and places at the end of the world, often returning to the north / south peripheries of northern Norway and Tasmania. Seeking to capture the heightened sense of liminality and edge-ness often felt at these sites, her work is conceptually underpinned by trepidation around the Anthropogenic condition and the consequent ambiguousness of overlapping human and geological time scales.
THIS IS NO FANTASY
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
www.thisisnofantasy.com
THK Gallery Cape Town: Barry Salzman, Nicola Brandt, Trevor Stuurman
Barry Salzman (Zimbabwe/US/ South Africa) 1963 (images 7-9)
Barry Salzman was born in Zimbabwe and schooled in South Africa. He emigrated to the United States when he was 21. After an initial business career, he began working as a full-time artist. His interest in photography started when, as a teenager, he was moved to document racially segregated areas under Apartheid, in an effort to understand the racial inequality that surrounded him. Today, his work continues to explore challenging social, political and economic issues, including the increasing universal fatigue around the Holocaust narrative, the fraying of the American Dream and society’s complicit behaviour in the recurrence of modern day genocide.
Since 2014, Salzman has worked on projects that address trauma and memory, often related to the recurrence of genocide. He is particularly interested in our role as public witness — “what we see when we look.” His work often depicts abstract landscapes, made at sites of genocide, that he represents in literal and metaphoric ways to reflect on trauma and healing. While the images are shot at precise locations where acts of genocide were perpetrated, his use of visual tools of abstraction reminds us that ‘that place’ can be ‘any place’.
Nicola Brandt (Namibia/Germany/ South Africa) 1983 (images 10-12)
Nicola Brandt is a multidisciplinary artist known for her large-scale photographs, video works, and installations that reflect on themes of power, memory, desire, and positionality. Part of an emerging generation of artists in the country of her birth, Brandt became known for her new, critical approach to place and landscape and her decolonial examination of German colonial history and memorial work. Her work foregrounds the idea that place and identity are mutually constituted and are impacted by environmental, social, and political factors. She is interested in how these experiences and effects might be communicated through expanded documentary and performance practices.
Enacting the idea that art can facilitate cross-cultural dialogue and social change, her work featured as part of intergovernmental talks between Namibia and Germany in 2015 and was showcased at the Nama and Herero Congress in Hamburg, Germany in 2018.
Trevor Stuurman (South Africa) 1992 (images 13-15)
Trevor Stuurman is an contemporary multimedia visual artist, who sees the world through his creative lens and finds beauty in that which reminds him of home – a place that is imbued with colour, love and belonging that reflects Africa. A seasoned explorer, he cites travel as his core inspiration. “The more I leave home, the more I realise the power and currency that home has. And I think that in turn makes me a better storyteller because I am able to find pieces of home wherever I go and then create tangible products”. This essence of belonging inspired him to host his first Solo Exhibition entitled “Home”, a love letter to the Himba women of Namibia that enjoyed a successful run at the Hazard Gallery in Johannesburg
His work with global humanitarian foundations includes the United Nations, Gates Foundation and the Auma Obama Foundation to document former American President Barack Obama. Described as “A cultural force” by CNN’S African Voices feature, Trevor continues to hone in on his creative eye and centres diverse beauty and fashion.. It is no wonder he believes that “Being African is his superpower.”
THK Gallery
Cape Town, 8001, South Africa
www.thkgallery.com
Urbanek London (Poland/US/UK) 1979 (images 16-18)
Urbanek’s practice analyses the theoretical and philosophical underpinning of photography. The focus of this inquiry in placed upon the relationship between photography and reality. Urbanek’s artworks at Unseen 2024 aim to show the problematic and complex nature of this relationship. The four works presented at the fair range from a ‘straight-forward’, un-manipulated photographic image (Open Forms), through works fusing photographic positives and negatives (White Lies and Brotherly Love) to a highly doctored, multilayered and constructed photographic construction (Sun.Flower). Those three distinct treatments aim to undermine the trust in photography and the belief that this mediums is able to truthfully picture the world we live in.
The artist takes the mundane and banal and turns them into a visual spectacle- fire, water, forest, garbage bags are ubiquitous and surround us on every day basis without us noticing them- the artist presents them as having an elemental, almost magical quality and lets the viewer see them as extraordinary marvels.
URBANEK
SE21 8QR London
https://urbanekgallery.co.uk/
VF Art Projects (Spain & Luxembourg) Hugo Aveta & Dionisio Gonzales
Hugo Aveta (Argentina) 1965 (images 19-21)
Internationally recognized Argentine artist . Hugo Aveta originally studied film and architecture, to dedicate himself later to photography. Many of the works of this multimedia artist t rack the memories and the t races of the difficult situations experienced by his country. Using photography and film, he also addresses the more universal themes of memory and its transmission. Aveta is also fascinated by material and by fault lines. His work evokes struggling forces, uncertainties, risks, failures, but also dreams and hopes that are fragile and shaken yet still standing. His most recently exhibit ions were “Invisible Gods” at Museo Inmigrantes in Buenos Aires, Argentina; “The fascination of the fault” at Kuzzam Palace in Saudi Arabia, and “The fascination of the fault” at MACVAL Museum of Contemporary Art in Paris, France. His work has been exhibited in the most recognized institutions
Dionisio Gonzales (Spain) 1965 (images 22-24)
Dionisio Gonzales is a visual artist of recognized international prestige whose work explores, in a purposeful way, the housing problems faced by vernacular and irregular architecture and the great , failed, constructive utopias of the second post -war period. In short , those architectures exposed to collapse and blurring. His work has been exhibited in the most recognized institutions and museums in the world
VF Art Projects
Spain & Luxembourg (2 locations)
www.vfprojects.com
