calendario eventi  :: 

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19/3/2014

Four exhibitions

Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam

Richard Mosse - The Enclave
21 March - 1 June 2014

Foam presents The Enclave by Richard Mosse, a major new multi-media installation which represented Ireland at the 55th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. The installation consists of six large screens which represent the conflict situation in Congo, shot with infrared film that was designed for camouflage detection resulting in vibrant, psychedelic magenta coloured sites of the jungle war zone. Besides the film installation, related photo works are presented.

Throughout 2012, Richard Mosse and his collaborators Trevor Tweeten and Ben Frost travelled in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, infiltrating armed rebel groups in a war zone plagued by frequent ambushes, massacres and systematic sexual violence. The resulting installation, The Enclave, is the culmination of Mosse's attempt to rethink war photography. It is a search for more adequate strategies to represent a forgotten African tragedy in which, according to the International Rescue Committee, at least 5.4 million people have died of war-related causes in eastern Congo since 1998.

A long-standing power vacuum in eastern Congo has resulted in a horrifying cycle of violence, a Hobbesian 'state of war', so brutal and complex that it resists communication, and goes unseen in the global consciousness. Mosse brings a discontinued military surveillance film to this situation, representing an intangible conflict with a medium that registers an invisible spectrum of infrared light, and was originally designed for camouflage detection. The resulting imagery, shot on 16mm infrared film by cinematographer Trevor Tweeten, renders the jungle war zone in a disorienting psychedelic palette. Ben Frost's ambient audio composition, comprised entirely of recordings gathered in the field in eastern DRC, hovers bleakly over the unfolding tragedy.

The Enclave immerses the viewer in a challenging and sinister world, exploring aesthetics in a situation of profound human suffering. At the heart of the project, as Mosse states, is an attempt to bring "two counter-worlds into collision: art's potential to represent narratives so painful that they exist beyond language, and photography's capacity to document specific tragedies and communicate them to the world."

The exhibition is sponsored by Eidotech.

Foam is sponsored by the BankGiro Loterij, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek, Delta Lloyd, Gemeente Amsterdam and the VandenEnde Foundation.
Foam

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Kaveh Golestan - The Citadel
21 March - 4 May 2014

Kaveh Golestan (1950-2003) was an important and prolific Iranian documentary photographer and a pioneer of street photography. His photographic practice has hugely informed the work of future generations of Iranian artists but has remained seriously over-looked in Europe. Kaveh Golestan - The Citadel presents 45 vintage photographs from the series entitled Prostitute taken between 1975-1977 of women working in the Citadel of Shahr-e No, the red light district of Teheran. The photographs will be exhibited for the first time as a vintage set since 1978. Alongside the photographs, the exhibition will include original diaries of Golestan, newspaper clippings and audio interviews that he collected from and relating to the area.

The Citadel
Shahr-e No (literally translated as 'New City') was an old walled neighbourhood in Teheran, which was accessed through a gate. The inhabitants were women and only men were allowed to visit the Citadel. Kaveh Golestan's record of the area is an important photographic document of this urban space. These images were taken over a period of two years, during which Golestan forged a trustful friendship with many of the residents. The series of portraits Golestan produced are a testament to an intimate, humane gaze into the lives and personalities of the resident women.

Prostitute series
Kaveh Golestan belonged to a very active intellectual and artistic milieu, socially driven and deeply committed to social issues. He published several groups of photographs from his Prostitute series in three extensive essays in the daily Iranian newspaper Ayandegan exposing and drawing attention to the living conditions of the women. In 1978 he exhibited the photographs at the University of Teheran for a short period lasting fourteen days. The exhibition was abruptly shut down, most probably under the pressure of the intelligence services, but without any official explanation. The series was also briefly shown in a sneak exposition in the Seyhoun Gallery stand at the Tehran Art Fair in the same year. This was the last time the vintage photographs were exhibited and they have never been seen again. However, this is not the only reason why this exhibition is of great importance.

Demolished
The district of the Citadel, photographed by Golestan, was set on fire and demolished within days of the Iranian revolution in 1979 through a decree by Ayatollah Khomeini. Some of the women were tragically charred to death during the blaze and several others were arrested and later faced the revolutionary firing squads in the summer of 1980. The revealing photographs made by Kaveh Golestan are the last traces left of these women and the urban space of the Citadel. The area was flattened and in an act of memory erasure converted into a park which stands today.

Historical events
Besides Shahr-e No, Kaveh Golestan also documented many other major historical events like the conflict in Northern Ireland, the Iranian revolution, The Iran-Iraq War, and the Gulf Wars. In 1979 he was awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal for "superlative photography requiring exceptional courage and enterprise abroad". He wasn't able to pick up the award until thirteen years later, as by then the work was no longer considered a threat to the Iranian government. While he was on an assignment in Iraq Golestan stepped on a fatal landmine on 2 April 2003. He died in Kifri in Northern Iraq. He was 52 years old. His documentary photographs have mainly been featured in reportages and books and his work has not been exhibited often. The Kunsthal (Rotterdam) showed the exhibition Kaveh Golestan 1950-2003. Recording the Truth in Iran in 2008.

Research project
Kaveh Golestan - The Citadel is curated by Vali Mahlouji as the first iteration of an on-going curatorial and research device entitled ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE FINAL DECADE. This larger project investigates the artistic milieu and intellectual conditions of the final decade before the fall of the shah in 1979 - the pre-revolutionary moment - in Iran. The project re-circulates and reincorporates historical and cultural material - destroyed, banned or under-represented, yet historically significant - back into cultural memory and discourse.

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Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs - Adding, Adding, Adding
21 maart – 11 mei 2014

In 2013, the annual Foam Paul Huf Award was awarded to the Swiss duo Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs (b. 1979). The international jury was deeply impressed: "As true illusionists intent on pushing against the boundaries of the medium, Onorato & Krebs skillfully engage their audiences and convey some of the magic that lies at the core of photographic image-making." Foam is proud to present Adding, Adding, Adding including brand new work by this duo, as part of the award.

Onorato & Krebs have been working together on a variety of projects on the cutting edge of photography, sculpture and installation since 2003. Few subjects remain untouched in their complex, yet highly accessible work, in which reality collides with fiction while humour converges with seriousness.

In 2012, rising stars Onorato & Krebs presented their work in Foam for the first time. In Adding, Adding, Adding new films will be presented that are built on the play between illusion and reality in urban spaces. Exclusively for Foam, a site-specific installation is set up in the garden.

Tayio Onorato and Nico Krebs became acquainted during their studies at the Zurich University of the Arts. Typical of their oeuvre is the interplay with the two-dimensional character of photography. They carefully construct their photos as sculptors do, moulding them until the final result is perfect - often paired with a subtle feeling for humour. This playful approach was developed during their studies, in reaction to the influential but strict and rigid documentary style of the Dusseldorf School of Photography.

Many of Onorato & Krebs' projects reflect their vast knowledge of photography and photo history. Their big breakthrough followed the publication of the book The Great Unreal (2009) in which they mixed the cliché of the great American landscape with the way in which countless photographers have depicted it. Onorato & Krebs also took the nearly obligatory 'American road trip', but ended with a commentary on fact and fiction in photography that was both intelligent and absurdist.

Since completing university, Onorato & Krebs have had exhibitions in places including the Kunsthalle Mainz, Germany, in 2011; Museum im Bellpark in Kriens, Switzerland, in 2010; Kunsthaus Aargau in Aurau, Switzerland in 2009; and PS1 MoMA in New York in 2006. They have also participated in group shows such as PhotoIreland Dublin and the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn in 2011, Fotohof Salzburg, the Kunsthalle Munchen in Munich and the Kunstraum Düsseldorf in 2010, and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, in 2009. Their work is included in various collections in Switzerland, including Fotomuseum Winterthur. A portfolio by the duo has been published in Foam Magazine #31 Ref. Onorato & Krebs live and work in Zurich and Berlin.

This exhibition is made possible by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia and JTI.

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Ola Lanko - All Year Round
21 March - 7 May 2014

In 3h, Foam's project space for young international talent, Ola Lanko presents her latest project All year round, a novel study and representation of the notion of time. It consists of 365 photographic works of the same view of the IJ waterway in Amsterdam, offering a literal overview of a year. It acts as a visual archive of all the details and events recorded by the camera during that period of time. The project is presented as a spatial installation, offering both the opportunity to experience time as momentum as well as a continuous and repetitive process where day, night, nature and changing weather conditions alternate organically. In the project, Lanko combines the mechanical logic of the camera with a romantic sense of impermanence.

From the window of Lanko's apartment, her camera took 2,000 automated pictures of the IJ every day. These pictures were organised in chronological order, creating panoramic ribbons of the passage of time. The start and end of the day mark the frame of the image, producing what looks from a distance like strips of tone and colour that vary depending on the time of day with a total length of 21,9 km. Close up, however, the details of what has passed before the camera become apparent. According to Lanko's own findings, only on Queen's Day in 2013 was there no commercial shipping on the water. She also discovered that there were 2.5 more cloudy days than sunny and that it rained 1,610 times. She carefully studied the colours in the photographs too. Each colour represents a certain weather condition, violet usually manifesting itself during the morning and bright yellow at the end of a sunny day.

All the images were saved in an online archive, where they are available for further viewing and study: www.1year365days.com

Ola Lanko (1985) studied sociology at the National University in Kiev and photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, from which she graduated in 2012. Her graduation project was awarded the Steenbergen Stipend, an annual prize for photography graduates. She also won the ING New Talent Photography Award 2013.

This exhibition was made possible with support from the Van Bijlevelt Foundation and the Gieskes-Strijbis Fund.

With special thanks to: Mondriaan Fonds en Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunsten (AFK). Vincent Knopper / kader-werk (www.kader-werk.nl). Design studio Perevorot (www.perevorot.com)

Image: Richard Mosse

PR / Communications
Head of Communications - Merel Kappelhoff
Communications - Sophie van der Heijden
Contact - pr@foam.org

Preview:
Thursday 20 March
9am Foam Café open for coffee and croissants
9.30am Welcome and short introduction photographers and curators.
9.30 - 10.30am preview exhibitions

Foam
Keizersgracht 609 - 1017 DS Amsterdam
Opening hours
Daily 10am - 6pm
Th/Fr 10am - 9pm
Admission
Adults € 9,50
Students/65+ € 7,00
CJP € 5,50
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Children <12 jaar gratis
ICOM gratis
Museumkaart / I amsterdam City Card gratis

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