calendario eventi  :: 

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21/3/2013

Three exhibitions

Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam

Lieko Shiga
Canary
22 March - 12 May 2013

Foam presents the Canary series by Japanese photographer Lieko Shiga (1980). In her work, Shiga combines local myths with stories of ordinary people and their personal memories, feelings and experiences. She thus creates fantastical and often dramatic images that make reference to the twilight area between dream and reality. Her often-dark work is deeply rooted in the Japanese folkloric tradition and the supernatural as a self-evident presence. Shiga is part of a new generation of Japanese photographers. Her photos are characterised by a distinctive use of light and colour and a powerful visual language based on her own fantasy.

Canary consists of about 50 works in various formats. In addition to photos, a film will be shown with the same title, and the images accompanied by a stirring audio track (composed by Yuta Segawa). The works in the series were shot in Brisbane (Australia), Singapore and northern Japan. In order to establish contact with local people in these areas, Shiga formulated a list, and asked questions about specific places, personal experiences and anecdotes. Her contact with the people and the places they referred to served as the starting point for the series. Ultimately, however, the photos mainly reflect the fantasy world of the artist.

In her first meeting with a person or a place, or even before, Shiga visualises the definitive image she is going to create - it is as if she steps beyond herself and her body and finds herself in another existential state. The title of the series is based on this state of mind: 'The body is simply a medium, I kept a canary inside my stomach.'

In most cases, the photos are deliberately staged, such as Wedding Veil, for which Shiga decorated a bare tree with thousands of paper blossoms or the surrealistic My Husband. For this intriguing image she created a huge animal skull, and posed alongside it. The series also contains several purely recorded images, such as Man Wearing Fur, for which she travelled to the mountains of northern Japan with a group of bear hunters.

Lieko Shiga was born in 1980 in the prefecture of Aichi. She presently lives and works in Sendai, Japan. In 2004 she graduated from the Chelsea University of Art and Design, London, earning a BA in Fine Arts and New Media. Canary won Lieko Shiga the 'Infinity Award (Young Photographer)' from the International Center of Photography, New York, in 2009. In 2007, her portfolio was published in Foam Magazine #12.

This exhibition has been made possible by JT International Company Netherlands BV (JTI). Partnership with Foam by JTI stems from the social responsibility that the company feels for institutions that maintain national and global cultural heritage, contemporary art and Japanese culture.

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Foto Galatasaray / Maryam Şahinyan's Photo Studio
22 March - 12 May 2013

Foam presents Foto Galatasaray - Maryam Şahinyan's Photo Studio, a selection from the complete professional archive of Maryam Şahinyan (Sivas, 1911 - Istanbul, 1996). Şahinyan worked as a photographer at her modest studio in Galatasaray, Beyoğlu in Istanbul uninterruptedly from 1935 until 1985. The archive is a unique inventory of the demographic transformations occurring on the socio-cultural map of Istanbul after the declaration of the Republic. It is also a chronological record of a female Istanbulite studio photographer's professional career.

Armed with the wooden bellows camera her father originally took over from a family that immigrated from the Balkans in the aftermath of the First World War, Şahinyan created an unparalleled visual coherence without compromising her technical and aesthetic principles. Consisting entirely of black-and-white and glass negatives, the physical archive of Foto Galatasaray is a rare surviving example of the classical photography studios of Istanbul's recent past.

Foto Galatasaray was never as visible as some of the elite photography studios, famous since the 19thcentury. Nonetheless, it played an important role in representing the middle and lower classes that ensured the continuity of the studio. Şahinyan was a devout Christian from Armenian descent, and her identity created a closely-knit circle that determined the sociological basis of Foto Galatasaray's clientele, setting it apart from Istanbul's other studios. Spanning half a century, her work impartially traces the ethnic, social, cultural, religious and economic transformations taking place at the center of the city.

From ordinary passport photos to photographs that turn important ceremonies, for which the subjectsprepared with great care, into memorabilia, Foto Galatasaray's mise-en-scènes offer proof that the need for cultural representation within the rush of daily life has in recent decades been of great importance. The archive covers various political periods, from the 1942 imposition of Turkey's Capital tax to the war against Cyprus in 1974. It also reflects a wide range of interests including the decrease in Istanbul's Greek, Jewish and Armenian populations as immigration from Anatolia increased; changes in dress, accessories and hair styles; the transformation of class and demographic structures in urban life; differences between generations created by adaptation to the city; prototypes of gender; and, naturally, the aesthetic preferences of Şahinyan as a female photographer.

Changing hands after Şahinyan left the studio in 1985, the archive was transferred to a storehouse belonging to Yetvart Tomasyan, owner of Aras Publishing. Twenty-five years later, approximately 200,000 negatives in the archive were, over the course of two years, sorted, cleaned, digitized, digitally restored, categorized and protected by a team under the direction of artist/researcher Tayfun Serttaş.

Foto Galatasaray research was conducted at SALT by Tayfun Serttaş. An exhibition of the same name was realised at SALT Galata in Istanbul late 2011.

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Foam 3h: Sara Cwynar
Everything in the Studio (Destroyed)
22 March - 16 May 2013

The work of Sara Cwynar in photography, installations and collage begins in obsessively collecting and ordering visual materials. Saving, taking and re-composing images in her art practice is a cathartic means of satisfying a constant impulse. She has to collect (even to hoard) and to create a tangible record of that experience, grabbing a small piece of the world and reconstituting it under her own terms. The resulting archive is composed of images saved from years of photo-taking, from encyclopedias, flea markets, and people she knows, as well as objects she encounters. In this process of accumulation and the resulting collection, she is interested in the ways in which we understand the world through pictures: how we view ourselves and our history through a shared image-based archive built from cultural fantasies and photographic tropes (examples include the commercial still life, the family portrait, the headshot and the landscape photograph). She is constructing her own personal archive as a way of intervening into the larger archive which she cannot control, and considering the life of photographs over time, especially at this time of change for the medium.

For the installation, Everything in the Studio (Destroyed), which will be presented at Foam 3h as part of the young talent programme of Foam, Sara Cwynar took all of the materials in her studio at one time, documented each item and arranged it into a digital plan where she could fit the entire contents into a corner of the gallery. She attempted to install the archive according to the plan, which quickly began to fall apart as images and objects were not how she had remembered them. She left the materials for a month, then destroyed the whole thing so that she would be forced to purge the archive - allowing herself to start anew, and documenting everything only with a camera. All that remains of this studio's worth of materials is the image.

The piece begins with a text by Andy Warhol where he explains that he "hates nostalgia" so rather than keeping any of his saved mementos and ephemera around, he puts everything in labeled boxes and stores it in New Jersey before eventually throwing it away. He doesn't want to live with his saved materials but he can't immediately discard them either. This project is Sara Cwynar's version of that idea: that the influence of an archive on an art practice is strong, but can also be overwhelming.

Sara Cwynar (1985, Vancouver) is a Canadian photographer, artist and graphic designer. She studied graphic design and photography at York University in Toronto and English at the University of British Columbia. Her work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Capricious Magazine, and Bad Day Magazine. She was listed as one of Print Magazine's 20 Under 30 New Visual Artists for 2011. Cwynar currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is represented by Cooper Cole gallery in Toronto. Cwynar has published several publications for which she did the graphic design herself: Kitsch Encyclopedia, Lost & Found and Simulated Landscapes. Her show in Foam 3h is her first solo show in Europe.

This exhibition has been made possible by Van Bijlevelt Stichting and the Gieskes-Strijbis Fund.

Foam is sponsored by the BankGiroLoterij, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek, Delta Lloyd and the VandenEnde Foundation.

Image: Chiaco, 2007 © Lieko Shiga / courtesy Gelerie Priska Pasquer, Keulen

For information and visual material please contact the communications department, e-mail foam@foam.org or phone +31 (0)20 5516500.

Foam
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