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2/11/2011

Photo Levallois

Different venues, Levallois

Festival

Launched in 2008 on the initiative of the city of Levallois, Photo Levallois returns in November 2011 for its fourth edition, confirming its commitment to contemporary photography in all its forms. From its beginning, the festival has been open to evolutions in photography without however favouring a particular trend, in order to respect photography’s plurality and richness, by according importance to young generations and to exchanges with the other creative domains. Internationally recognized, emerging artists as well as amateur photographers, all have a place in an event which gathers together major currents of contemporary photography.

In today’s rich photography scene, Photo Levallois intends to stand out through its international dimension, the boldness of its choices and its accessibility to the widest public possible. Following the example of the Levallois – Epson 2011 Photography Prize whose influence today is international, since its beginnings the festival has been open to artists from all over the world and to most new proposals.

This year, the 5 Photo Levallois exhibitions of are in three different locations and favour complementarity.

Every year a well known artist is welcomed in the Salons d’Honneur of the Town Hall for a large scale exhibition based on a set of new works. After Rip Hopkins ( 2008 ), Xavier Zimmermann ( 2009 ) and Manuela Marques ( 2010 ), Reiner Riedler, major figure of the new European documentary photography has place of honor in Photo Levallois in 2011.

Close by and outdoors in the public space, Mathieu Tonetti's images evoke the vision of Los Angeles bathed in an atmosphere of science fiction.

As every year, the Escale gallery features the Levallois – Epson 2011 Photography Prize winners: Alexander Gronsky, Nathalie Mohadjer, Loïc Molon and the duet The Blood Next Door : a glimpse of young international photographic creation.

The Gustave Eiffel media library, which was inaugurated last spring, is new to the 2011 festival. It offers to the shows a field of experimentation at the margins of the medium of photography with an in situ installation realized by Gabriel Desplanque and Camille Debray.

Finally, as every year, the Levallois Photo - Club completes this program, with a collective thematic exhibition in the Town Hall cloister.

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Reiner Riedler, Cour intérieure

From November 25 to December 17
Salons d'Honneur de l'Hôtel de Ville, Levallois

Traveling implies accepting all sorts of changes and we can measure the distance covered in the ells of these daily upheavals. According to Reiner Riedler the distance which prevails, nourishes and intoxicates is, above all, a human one (cultural, anthropological and symbolic) rather than geographic.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, a longing to travel, which Reiner Riedler perceived as leading to the beyond, to the unknown, drove him onto the roads of Central Europe near his native Austria. This was at the time when the Berlin Wall fell and the Eastern block opened up; Reiner Riedler was 20 years old.

We can easily imagine the fascination the young Austrian must have felt for these bordering countries whose culture was so very different from the one in which he grew up. Albania, the Balkans and then, closer and closer, Poland Ukraine and, at last, Russia, that other pole whose influence Austria had felt throughout the course of History, just as it had, that of its opposite, Western Europe.

Twenty years on, Riedler is one of the major figures of that generation of photographers of reality who explore incessantly the border between document and fiction. Self-taught, Riedler has forged and refined his personal style, which mixes corrosive humour, delicacy, exuberance and nostalgia.

The journey as a poetic experience, in the course of which, the unknown can take on the cast of dream and the night is a time of change and renewal, are the two ideas which have inspired this exhibition, which will assemble a large number of new images, including a series made during the season of the midnight sun in Saint Petersburg, in June 2011.

Entitled "The dark curtain", this series constitutes a new stage for Reiner Riedler, as far as the importance given to mental space with regard to objective reality is asserted more distinctly.

This exhibition will be an opportunity for the public to discover Reiner Riedler's work from a less familiar angle, more completely. Indeed, if his series, "Fake hollydays" has already been widely exhibited in France (in particular in Montpelier in 2006, at La Maison Rouge ("The Red House") in 2009 and at the Pompidou Centre in 2010), it represents only one aspect of this artist's work, which is both varied and constantly evolving.

Reiner Riedler was born in Austria in 1968. He now lives in Vienna.
He has published several books, including: "Ukraine" (pub. Otto Müller Verlage) and "fake holidays" (pub. Moser).
In France, he is represented by the Heart Gallery, Paris.

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Mathieu Tonetti, Rancho mirage

From November 4 to December 17
Place de la République, Levallois
Station : Anatole France, l. 6 (Underground)

Mathieu Tonetti first won renown for directing video clips and documentary films for artists such as AIR and Phoenix as well as being known for his long collaboration with accomplice Sébastien Tellier.

Profoundly influenced by pop culture which he wanted to experience at source, Mathieu Tonetti lived for a time between Paris and Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, which he describes as 'a mirage in the desert', he took photos every day, using a simple iPhone, initially with no precise intention other than making a daily recording of his impressions of the city which he found so fascinating.
For Tonettei, Los Angeles, its excesses, failures and decadent greatness, is part of mythology in being one of the last the last expressions of the American Dream.

Free from any concern for realism, Tonetti depicts a hallucinatory portrait of the city of Los Angeles, which he recreates as post-apocalyptic and practically deserted, in which only the odd, rare human being continues to live and where vegetation proliferates and chaos reigns. The colors, touched up by iPhone applications are distorted and saturated until a break off point from reality is reached; reality, here is a mere pretext and tends to science fiction.

The radicality of his choices about framing and exuberance of color bring a visual impact to these images which conveys the jubilation with which Mathieu Tonetti has redrawn the city of Los Angeles.

Through this work, which was remarked upon in the Dystopia exhibition at the CAPC in Bordeaux in 2011, Mathieu Tonetti shows that he is a multi-faceted artist. At the present time, Tonetti wishes to move on to sculpture and installation art as well as continuing to direct films.

Mathieu Tonetti was born in 1976. He lives in Paris.
He is represented by Swiss Kiss agency.

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Alexander Gronsky
Mountains & Waters
2011 City of Levallois – Epson Photography Prize Winner

Exhibition From November 4 to December 17
L'Escale gallery, Levallois
(5' from the) Station Clichy-Levallois (railway)

Alexander Gronsky is a landscape photographer. He is patient, prefers long term work and is endowed with great sureness in his approach. Gronsky creates series whose treatment is always specific and extremely assertive. After having brought an impressive documentary about the outskirts of Moscow, entitled « The Edge », to a succesful conclusion after three years of work, the photographer wished to turn his attention to unknown lands.

He escaped to China during the winter of 2010- 2011 for a first visit of two months. His discovery of big cities like Shanghai, Chongqing and Shenzhen, the frenetic urbanisation of whose outskirts forms almost anarchically organised semi-urban fringes. Alexander Gronsky has always been used to the great, empty, silent spaces of Russia, so he had to deal with the profusion and the titanic scale of the constructions which over-run these changing lands. The idea of creating diptychs became obvious to him, allowing him to embrace a wider field of vision, as well as to accept aesthetically doubts about the supposed objectivity of photography.The floating space between two images set side by side is, in effect, a blank to which one’s eyes are drawn and which one’s imagination hastens to fill. A second month long visit allowed him to give to these choices the masterful, formal accomplishment to be found in these photos.

This head-on treatment, monumentality and the sharp precision of the images, which were realized with an medium format camera as well as the chromatic richness displayed in these landscapes, place them in the tradition of the Düsseldorf School, from which, however, He claims his independence. Gronsky also evokes the traditional conception of landscape in Chines culture, which is more of a mental image than an objective representation. Gronsky pays tribute to this tradition by entitling his series « Mountains and Waters ».

Indeed, the combination of the Chinese characters representing "mountain" and "water" form the Chinese word for "landscape". Duality, an essential idea in Chinese thought, runs through this series of photographs which go from real to unreal and back again.

"Mountains and Waters" thus constitutes an important stage in the path of this young photographer, who today says he feels the need to return to his beloved Russian landscapes.

The Levallois exhibition will be an exclusive opportunity to discover « Mountains and Waters ». It is the first large-scale exhibition in France of a young artist whose career is already well launched. His previous work, "The Edge", was shown at the Aperture Foundation in New York and at FOAM (Amsterdam) in 2010.

Alexander Gronsky was born in Talinn, Estonia in 1980. He is now based in Lithuania.
He is represented by the agency, Photographer.ru

http://www.alexandergronsky.com/

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The Blood Next Door collective

With a corrosive humor which attacks head on the omnipresent yet repressed failings of our society, the duo The Blood Next Door, practice a kind of jubilant resistance to the alienation in which our age is stuck.
Proceeding with forms of creation which often echo amateur and low tech practices, they operate by deplacing, diverting and pushing to the limit the dead ends, contradictions and cultural stereotypes which stand out, or even structure, consumer society.
Money, power, communication, barbarity, immediate gratification, the absurdity and potential anarchy of a world, which is nevertheless organized down to the slightest detail, are so many subjects of inspiration for their deliberately exaggerated images, which often take the shape of gags.
The treatment of their photographs often takes form of ironic comment, between obvious scene setting and emphatic digital touching up, it brings to the fore the techniques of publicity photography, which reveals less willingly these re-orderings of reality. Is our age stressful? Certainly, but it can also be lived through with great roars of laughter.

The Blood Next Door is a duo formed by Anthony Peskine and Nazheli Perrot, two ENSBA, Paris graduates.

They exhibited at Gallery André and Catherine Hug (Paris) in 201

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Nathalie Mohadjer
Zwei Bier Für Haïti

Une qualité qui traverse les photographies de Nathalie Mohadjer semble être l'attention délicate à ceux qui vivent dans des conditions difficiles, de préférence dans une proximité quasi immédiate et paradoxalement aveuglante.

Qu'ils soient sans papiers à Paris (où elle vit depuis 2007), adolescents dans un quartier marginalisé à Weimar (elle a étudié la photographie au Bauhaus), réfugiés ou orphelins en Bosnie, Roms du Kosovo, tous ceux vers qui Nathalie Mohadjer tourne son objectif sont aux prises avec des difficultés qui dépassent le paradigme de la vie quotidienne européenne telle qu'on se la représente généralement.

Zwei Bier fur Haiti est un ensemble de photographies réalisées en 2006 et 2010 dans un foyer pour sans abris, à Weimar. Au fil des visites, Nathalie Mohadjer a tissé des liens avec les résidents aux parcours chaotiques, vivant au jour le jour entre déchéance et rédemption, généralement sans perspective tangible de réinsertion dans une une vie "normale". La bienveillante retenue dont elle a fait preuve vis-à-vis d'eux transparaît dans ces photographies d'une grande sensibilité, parcourues de temps à autre par un éclair de poésie irréelle.
Ce parti-pris humain trouve son prolongement formel dans la précision et la cohérence qui caractérise la série. Précision des cadrages qui éludent souvent les visages et laissent une grande place au vide, ouvrant un espace flottant dans lequel les personnages se retrouvent comme en suspens, traitement remarquable de la couleur dont l'intensité varie avec finesse selon une dynamique subtile, l'ensemble présente une unité que l'on retrouve rarement dans le registre documentaire, sauf à céder au systématisme et à suivre un protocole bien précis. Ce n'est pas le choix de Nathalie Mohadjer, qui n'intervient pas dans la mise en scène de ses images, laissant la dynamique mystérieuse des rapports humains opérer librement. Le titre énigmatique renvoie à une anecdote touchante. Lorsqu'en janvier 2010, un cyclone a dévasté Haiti, une pensionnaire du centre a organisé une collecte afin de venir en aide aux survivants. Gageons qu'à ce point précis, entre dérisoire et poignant, la solidarité qui anime la photographe est entrée en résonance avec celle de ceux qu'elle a photographiés, dessinant une humanité certes chancelante mais restaurée et magnifiée.

Nathalie Mohadjer est née en Allemagne en 1979. Elle vit à Paris et est membre du collectif de photographes Le bar Floréal.
Zwei Bier für Haiti sera exposé en décembre 2011 à la Kunsthalle Weimar, en Allemagne.

http://www.nathaliemohadjer.com/

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Loïc Molon, Correspondance

Closer to visual arts in general art than solely photography, Loïc Molon tackles different registers in his work. Be it a black and white reportage on the French anti-CPE demonstrations in 2006, which he captures as if in a daydream with a hazy atmosphere or be it works of animation constructed with still images and set to music, we can feel the artist’s sensitivity to shifting meanings caused by the representation or re-appropriation of reality.

The images of « Correspondence » are taken from 8mm films shot in the 50s and 60s by two key characters in Loïc Molon’s family history: his grandfather and the other man in his grandmother’s life. He knew both of them only very briefly. Just after the death of his grandfather Molon was animated by a need to create a relationship and so retrieved these films from family members and began to photograph extracts on the frosted glass of a viewer.

With great economy, limiting himself only to choosing the images to be reproduced, he has constructed a series of tiny, strong grained photographs in the bright colors characteristic of 8mm films. Indiscriminately mixing the souvenirs recorded by both deceased men, his choices mainly concern those photograms having an archetypal character and which defy temporal reference points summoning forth the fancy of disassociated inventions.

If every artistic approach inevitably contains a risk, the one taken by Loïc Molon in this creation has doubtless been to confine himself to minimal intervention, however, this is also what makes « Correspondence » so successful ; it is exactly what conceals the subtle and fragile balance between what is real and what is imaginary.

Loïc Molon was born in Pont-l'Abbé in 1980. He trained in photography at the Louis-Lumière School and to-day lives in Paris.

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Gabriel Desplanque & Camille Debray

From November 4 to December 17
Place de la République, Levallois
Station : Anatole France, l. 6 (Underground)

The Gustave Eiffel multimedia library, which is being used as exhibition space for the first time during this 2011 festival, is an experimental space, outside strictly photographic frontiers.

This space, which was inaugurated in spring 2011, is dedicated not only to the dissemination of knowledge but also to exchanges, and will host a quite different event from the other festival exhibitions. Photography is the point of departure of a work conceived in situ by two artists with extremely distinct practices and horizons.

Gabriel Desplanque is a plastic artist who favours photography and video. He has invited Camille Debray to place his images into the space of the multimedia library's reading-room. The two artists met at the Paris Fine Arts School, on the research programme, "La Seine".

Gabriel Desplanque's photographs reveal bodies battling against their environment in settings reminiscent of mysterious choreographies. These images are striking in many ways: at the same time as conveying immediacy and enjoying great formal unity, there is a multiplicity of underlying detail whose strangeness resists analysis.

Eluding any univocal narration or symbolism, they evoke a multitude of possible interpretations but which, the photographs themselves, end up by demolishing.

Camille Debray also favours uncertain spaces, spaces which connect image and volume in installations which generally refer to painting and sculpture.

Together, they have created a space dedicated to the users of the multimedia library who thereby become a part of the work itself.

Gabriel Desplanque was born in 1980. A graduate of both ENSAD and ENSBA in Paris, he has taken part in numerous exhibitions both in France and abroad.

Camille Debray was born in 1982. After studying at Villa Arson in Nice, she obtained a B.A. degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne and joined the "La Seine" programme.


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Levallois Photo Club
Anthropocene or the influence of man on his environment

From december 1-17, 2011

The Levallois Photo Club is returning to the 2011 Festival with a collective proposal around the notion of anthropocene, a notion which is heatedly debated within the scientific community.

The term was coined in 1992 by the journalist Andrew Revkin it was then popularised by Chemistry Nobel Prize Winner, Paul Crutzen. Anthropocene designates the new ecological age ushered in by the Industrial Revolution, from which time man's influence on the terrestrial system became predominant.

The importance of official recognition of anthropocene in the geological time scale (which could happen in 2012 in Brisbane on the occasion of the 34th international congress of geology) is obviously not that of merely linguistic and technical debate; anthropocene is the reflection of opposing conceptions which do not imply at all the same responsibility on the part of the human race in terms of current global disorder.

It is these differences of points of view and questionings about the great environmental stakes that the thirteen creators, members of the X23 collective will advance through photographic works of great diversity which try to grasp anthropocene from individual experience.

Photographs by Joëlle Bazire, Luciano Bello, Thomas Cayzergues, Aurélien Freret, Christian Joseph, François-Xavier Granveau, Enrick Hansen, Joseph Hamze, Georges Le Roux, Pierre Leleu, Clément Pantin, Thierry Pichard, Jean Pol Stercq, Karina Walbrecq.

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Image: Reiner Riedler, Russian Princess, 2011

Press and sponsors/parteners: Matthieu Nicol
t/ +33 6 67 57 31 31 / info@photo-levallois.org

Opening november 3rd

Different venues
Salons d'Honneur de l'Hôtel de Ville
Médiathèque Gustave-Eiffel
Jardins de l'Hotel de Ville
De L'Escale Gallery
Levallois

stampa

permanent link