LANGart: Laura Hospes (1994) (image 1)
Laura Hospes (Wageningen, 1994) started as photographer but soon she expanded her art practice and incorporated performances, video works, sculptures, drawings, paintings and writing to her body of work.
“…retrieving the existence of my body is something I have been doing for years by aggressively forcing my skin to feel. Exploring other versions of reality by capturing and archiving the capabilities of my body through the arts is gradually taking over this task. Could (interactive) performative art, aiming at the ephemeral and bodily character of it, be a next step in my quest to the existence of my body?”
Her skin is the co-author of her work she says, her subject of research, always present in her works. The skin, our biggest organ, our protection against low or high temperatures, pressure, bumps and friction. Skin makes heat, cold, pressure, itching, pain palpable. Our skin produces vitamin D and has the capacity of storing fat in better times to use in the bad. Our epidermis can renew itself in just four weeks. Laura Hospes uses these qualities as she says: ”While scrutinizing my skin from the outside I notice a sensation of admiration and surprise. I tremendously respect its ability to regenerate, to pass on messages, to develop, to read and being read”. Besides painting her skin with plaster she uses other means to manipulate our perspective on skin: she covers her skin with transparent tape or wears a body suit known as a fat suit and sometimes she constricts her body so tightly that stretch marks remain visible in her skin in order to test the abilities, the aesthetic qualities and functions and interaction with her skin. In awkward poses – sometimes uncomfortable, at times not free of sexual charge – she exposes herself in an objectified way to the public.
Photographing her own body, more specifically the surface of her body or distorted parts of it, she shows to the world her inner struggle with life. In her case the skin does not protect her from her pain, rather it shows in all roughness the purity and intimacy of her struggles.
Laura Hospes is presented by LANGart at the UNSEEN fair with het work titled Jenny. Her performance ‘No Man’s Land’ is shown at Unbound.
LANGart
1016 SP Amsterdam
+31 (0)624605088 or +31 (0)643263701
[email protected]
www.langart.nl
Migrant Bird Space: Luo Yang, Lin Zhipeng, Gulu & Feng Li (images 2-3)
Migrant Bird Space is located in the centre of Berlin, and we have always set as our goal the promotion of young Chinese artists in Europe. This year, with our participation in Unseen 2022, we would like to introduce four of our amazing photographers not only to the Dutch audience but to the International one as well. Luo Yang, Lin Zhipeng, Gulu and Feng Li record the rapid changes happening in Chinese society nowadays, especially among the young population, who are not afraid to express themselves freely. Based in three different cities, their bold and vibrant colours capture aspects of ordinary life, otherwise unnoticed.
We chose to group them to bring light to their differences, but very close points of view on the Chinese society in the 21st century.
Migrant Bird Space
10115 Berlin, Germany
+49-30-49952524
[email protected]
www.migrantbirdspace.com
NYC Salt: Malike Sidibe & Daniel Martinez (images 4-5)
NYC Salt is a non-profit photography program in New York City. Our mission is to engage, inspire, and empower youth from underserved, predominantly immigrant communities to reach their full potential and develop a sense of agency, belonging, and integrated identity through the lens of a camera. We achieve this through multi-year, rigorous, sequential photography and video instruction taught by artists and industry professionals combined with individualized mentoring, college preparation and guidance, career exploration, employment opportunities and vocational training.
We will be presenting two of our emerging artists at Unseen this year and three bodies of work: a collection of portraiture, a documentary project of the first couples of days of the Black Lives Matter Protests in NYC from 2020, published in Time Magazine and The New York Times Magazine, and a documentary story about the community of a local basketball court in the South Bronx. The photographs offer a view of fashion, conflict and community in New York City.
Malike Sidibe is a 25-year-old artist (originally from the Ivory Coast). Besides producing beautiful work that is influenced by his African heritage, Sidibe has gained global recognition for his emotive and poignant images documenting the Black Lives Matter Movement.
Daniel Martinez is a 29-year-old Puerto Rican photographer, illustrator and filmmaker born and raised in the Bronx, New York. He gained his love of photography from his dad and at an early age fostered a body of work focused on the beauty of the people and culture in the South Bronx. Currently, Daniel is a CGI and animation content creator at Duggal Solutions. He is a scholarship recipient of Camera Voyages allowing him to photograph a trek up to Base Camp in Mount Everest. He has travelled to Guatemala to shoot for The Global Healthworks Foundation, a humanitarian outreach organization that provides free integrative healthcare to medically underserved communities, and he has been on assignment for ESPN.
NYC Salt
New York, NY 10001
(917) 992-6756
[email protected]
www.nycsalt.org
www.migrantbirdspace.com
OstLicht. Gallery for Photography: Francesca Catastini (1982), Anna Breit (1991). (images 6-7)
Francesca Catastini’s photographic work aims to overcome the idea of separation, initiating an interaction of images with other images, text, or objects. Through this process of continuous invention and layering, new meanings are achieved. In ‘The Modern Spirit Is Vivisective’ the artist ventures in the history of the study of anatomy and the phenomenon of public dissections & ‘Petrus’ Catastini explores the human need to define oneself and the world through specific forms.
Anna Breit moves between fashion photography and free artistic projects, where she mainly takes pictures of her friends, family and surroundings. She mainly works in series, that provide a thematic orientation, but within which she maintains a momentary and spontaneous photographic practice.
„Dear Mama, I think you are truly beautiful. Happy Birthday! Anna” – Her work ‘Mama’ is an ongoing project created over several years that portrays her mother. The work can be understood as a love letter to her mother.
OstLicht. Gallery for Photography
A-1100 Vienna, Austria
+43 (0)1 996 20 66
[email protected]
www.ostlicht.org
Project 2.0: Larissa Ambachtsheer, Manon Hertog, David Hummelen and Sanja Marušić (images 8-9)
Project 2.0 / Gallery is participating at UNSEEN with works of Larissa Ambachtsheer, Manon Hertog, David Hummelen and Sanja Marušić. They are a exquisit group of very talented photographic artists, who bring colourful, diverse images and affordable art to UNSEEN. Their ambition is contagious, and we have no doubt that these artists are on their way to make a name for themselves in the photographic community.The images presented are carefully curated for quality, colour and accessibility. The four Dutch artists share a fresh view on daily life, habits and situations. Their works give the viewer not only a beautiful and powerful image to look at, but something to think about as well: what do you see and how is it manipulated? Each artist is playing with elements, colour or scale. The mysterious enlargements, movements or odd colour choices of daily things, create surrealistic scenes or maybe just an openminded view of the world around us.
Project 2.0 / Gallery
2514 GC Den Haag
+31 (0)703450357
[email protected]
www.project20.nl
ROBERT MORAT GALERIE : Lena Amuat & Zoë Meyer (images 10-11)
ROBERT MORAT GALERIE, Berlin, is very happy to announce representation for Swiss artist duo Lena Amuat & Zoë Meyer with works from their series »Artefakte und Modelle 2009-2022«.
A collection of objects that embody the human struggle for knowledge and a curious taxonomy is encountered in Lena Amuat & Zoë Meyer’s photographic project, over twelve years in the making and numbering hundreds of images, which inventories the models, artefacts, natural specimen and teaching objects they have unearthed travelling to search through the archives and collections of European universities and natural history museums. Simply titled and numbered according to the artists’ own categories – Mathematisches Modell (Mathematical Model), Verlorene Sammlung (Lost Collection), Flügel (Wing) to name but a few – the photographs celebrate relics of recent European thought and reveal a particular way of understanding the world.
However, with information and provenance entirely exorcised from their titles, we are left knowing almost nothing factual about each of the photographed items. Instead, they are left to communicate through the power of their visual identity alone.
Each of the selected objects is treated in the artists’ mobile photo studio where they are sympathetically posed in front of coloured paper backdrops (sometimes assembled with other items, but most often standing alone), seductively lit and skillfully shot: their charisma given the chance to shine. And shine they do. Each object is presented as a readymade artwork in its own right, addressing the viewer as bold, precise and enigmatic forms. The mathematical models (which outnumber all the others in the series) exhibit their complex geometries with conviction, Brancusi-esque in their promise of representing »not the outer form but the idea, the essence of things«.
Going against the surge of digital, the duo embraces analogue and the »hand-made« – from darkroom printing to carefully prepared colour backdrops and hand-painted frames that they build themselves. A book of the series has been published by About Books in 2021. Lena Amuat (*1977) and Zoë Meyer (*1975) live and work in Zurich and Berlin.
ROBERT MORAT GALERIE
10115 Berlin, Germany
+49 30 25209358
[email protected]
www.robertmorat.de
Galerie Ron Mandos – Amsterdam: Erwin Olaf, Mohau Modisakeng, Gilleam Trapenberg, Sander Coers & Kwadwo Amfo. (images 12-13)
Galerie Ron Mandos is excited to be part of the 2022 edition of Unseen Photo Fair Amsterdam. This year’s presentation includes a selection of works by Erwin Olaf, Mohau Modisakeng, Gilleam Trapenberg, Sander Coers and Kwadwo Amfo.
Gilleam Trapenberg
Born in 1991 in Willemstad, Curaçao; lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Gilleam Trapenberg (1991, Willemstad, Curaçao) moved to the Netherlands at the age of nineteen and graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 2017. He participated in multiple group exhibitions, such as In The Presence of Absence at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2020). In 2017 he published his first photo book Big Papi and in 2018 he was one of the nominees for the Foam Paul Huf Award. He’s the fourth recipient of the Florentine Riem Vis grant (2020). His first solo exhibition at Foam, Amsterdam opened in 2021.
Through his work, Trapenberg reflects on the contradictions that are part of the social landscape in Curaçao, were the idea of a utopian paradise is diametrically opposed to the realities of post-colonialism and tourism. He explores stereotypes and tropes that have manifested themselves through social culture and the Western media
Erwin Olav
Erwin Olaf was born in 1959 in Hilversum, The Netherlands & he lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Erwin Olaf is an internationally exhibiting artist whose diverse practice centres around society’s marginalized individuals, including people of color and the LGBTQ+ community. In 2019 Olaf became a Knight of the Order of the Lion of the Netherlands after 500 works from his oeuvre were added to the collection of the Rijksmuseum. Taco Dibbits, Rijksmuseum director, called Olaf “one of the most important photographers of the final quarter of the 20th century”.
In 2018, Olaf completed a triptych of monumental photographic and filmic tableaux portraying periods of seismic change in major world cities, and the citizens embraced and othered by their urban progress. Like much of his work, it is contextualized by complex race relations, the devastation of economic divisions, and the complications of sexuality. Olaf has maintained an activistic approach to equality throughout his 40-year career after starting out documenting pre-AIDS gay liberation in Amsterdam’s nightlife in the 1980s.
A bold and sometimes controversial approach has earned the artist a number of prestigious collaborations, from Vogue & Louis Vuitton to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. He served as the official portrait artist for the Dutch royal family in 2017, and designed the national side of the euro coins for King Willem-Alexander in 2013. He has been awarded the Netherlands’ prestigious Johannes Vermeer Award, as well as Photographer of the Year at the International Color Awards, and Kunstbeeld magazine’s Dutch Artist of the Year.
Mohau Modisakeng
Mohau Modisakeng (ZA, 1986) introduces photographs from Madimatle, a new series of works to be presented in his solo exhibition at Galerie Ron Mandos opening on September 31st. The photographs make reference to a sacred mountain in a historic area in South Africa that has for centuries been the site of pilgrimages and traditional spiritual rituals. In the last 5 years the mountain has become the site of an ongoing legal battle between the community that use the mountain and its network of caves for sacred spiritual reasons and the foreign mining company that has been granted rights to mine the apex of this sacred mountain.
Sander Coers
Sander Coers (NL, 1997) is a Rotterdam-based artist working with photography. Recreating and rearranging memories, he reflects on his own stories as well as those of his friends and peers, often other young men. Through a tender gaze, he seeks to visualize and establish new perceptions of masculinity within melancholic, romantic and dreamlike worlds, comprising elements from nostalgic echoes of his youth. The series Blue Mood (Al Mar), of which we will present work at Unseen, is a tender portrait of a generation. In this exploration and celebration of adolescence, Coers revisits, recreates and rearranges the collected memories of his friends, contemporaries and himself within a colorful, warm and dreamlike world, a hallucinative landscape based on their stories on the vulnerability of growing up, the transformation to adulthood, the fragility of young masculinity and finding love and self-acceptance.
Kwadwo Amfo
For Kwadwo Amfo (GH, 1990), social commentary became the base of his work throughout the years ranging from societal beauty standards, identity politics, social inclusion and conformity, and topics on the self and the other. Amfo has expanded this into works that speak representations of misrepresentations, stereotypes and struggles of people of colour. Amfo’s decision to almost exclusively depict black characters, individuals of African heritage, reflects his desire, born of his own experiences, to bring to the fore the inadequate and troubling representations of black people in today’s media, as well as throughout history. His series SILHOUETTE investigates and displays representations of misrepresentation of black men that has permeated our public consciousness. Decontextualizing affirmations, illustrating what it is like to inhabit white-dominant spaces — nuanced statements about simply being.
RON MANDOS
1016HJ Amsterdam The Netherlands
+31 20 3207036
[email protected]
www.ronmandos.nl
