The Merchant House Amsterdam: Amanda Means (1945, NY) (images 1-3)
Amanda Means is known for her palpably material black-and-white gelatin silver prints. Means’s virtuoso projections of light without a camera—by physically projecting light onto the developing paper—give rise to her evocative and masterful printing technique. The result is a luminous presentation of everyday objects, such as light bulbs and glasses of water, in an unexpected serial close-up. A 2017 Guggenheim Fellow honored for her contributions to contemporary photography, Means’ work is included 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 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)
The artistic practice ofEllen Dahl is largely rooted in working with or around landscape. The concept of photography’s intrinsic implication in how we see and experience the world around us is at the foundation of her projects. She continually explores the expanded scope 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 work through photography, video and still image, sound and installation.
Dahl is consistently drawn to the concept of the island and places at the edge of the world, often returning to the northern/southern peripheries of northern Norway and Tasmania. Seeking to capture the heightened sense of liminality and limit often felt at these sites, her work is conceptually underpinned by the trepidation around the anthropogenic condition and the consequent ambiguity of overlapping human and geological timescales.
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 educated in South Africa. He emigrated to the United States at the age of 21. After an initial commercial career, he began working as a full-time artist. His interest in photography was sparked when, as a teenager, he was drawn to document racially segregated areas under apartheid, in order to understand the racial inequality that surrounded him. Today, his work continues to explore difficult social, political and economic issues, including the growing universal fatigue around the Holocaust narrative, the erosion of the American Dream and society’s complicity in the recurrence of modern genocides.
Since 2014, Salzman has worked on projects that address trauma and memory, often in relation to the recurrence of genocide. He is particularly interested in our role as public witnesses—“what we see when we look.” His work often depicts abstract landscapes, made at sites of genocide, which he represents literally and metaphorically to reflect on trauma and healing. Although the images are taken in specific locations where acts of genocide have occurred, his use of the visual tools of abstraction reminds us that “this 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 address themes of power, memory, desire, and position. Part of an emerging generation of artists in her native country, Brandt has become known for her fresh and critical approach to place and landscape and her decolonial examination of German colonial history and commemorative work. Her work foregrounds the idea that place and identity are mutually constituted and influenced by environmental, social, and political factors. She is interested in how these experiences and effects can be communicated through documentary practices and expanded performances.
Implementing the idea that art can facilitate intercultural dialogue and social change, his work was presented at intergovernmental discussions between Namibia and Germany in 2015 and was exhibited at the Nama and Herero Congress in Hamburg, Germany in 2018.
Trevor Stuurman (South Africa) 1992 (images 13-15)
Trevor Stuurman is a contemporary multimedia visual artist who sees the world through his creative lens and finds beauty in what reminds him of home – a place infused with colour, love and belonging that reflects Africa. A seasoned explorer, he cites travel as his main source of inspiration. “The more I leave my country, the more I realise the power and importance of my country. I think it makes me a better storyteller because I am able to find elements of home everywhere I go and create tangible products.” This sense of belonging inspired him to curate his first solo exhibition entitled “Home”, a love letter to the Himba women of Namibia, which was successfully exhibited at Hazard Gallery in Johannesburg
He works with international humanitarian foundations including the United Nations, the Gates Foundation and the Auma Obama Foundation, which documents former US President Barack Obama. Described as “a cultural force” by CNN’s African Voices, Trevor continues to hone his creative eye and his beauty and fashion hubs. It’s no wonder he believes “being African is his superpower.”
THK Gallery
Cape Town, 8001, South Africa
www.thkgallery.com
Urbanek London: Maciej Urbanek (Poland/USA/UK)1979 (images 16-18)
The practice ofUrbanek analyzes the theoretical and philosophical foundations of photography. The focus is on the relationship between photography and reality. Urbanek’s works presented 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” and unmanipulated photographic image (Open Forms) to a highly manipulated, multi-layered and constructed photographic construction (Sun.Flower), to works merging photographic positives and negatives (White Lies and Brotherly Love). These three distinct treatments aim to shake the trust in photography and the belief that this medium is capable of faithfully depicting the world we live in. The artist takes the everyday and the mundane and transforms them into a visual spectacle – fire, water, the forest, garbage bags are omnipresent and surround us every day without us noticing them – the artist presents them as having an elemental, almost magical quality, and lets the viewer perceive them as extraordinary wonders.
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 renowned Argentine artist. He first studied cinema and architecture, before devoting himself to photography. Many of the works of this multimedia artist evoke memories and difficult situations experienced by his country. Using photography and cinema, he also addresses the more universal themes of memory and its transmission. Aveta is also fascinated by matter and fault lines. His work evokes forces in struggle, uncertainties, risks, failures, but also dreams and hopes that are fragile and shaken, but still standing. His most recent exhibitions have been “Invisible Gods” at the Museo Inmigrantes in Buenos Aires, Argentina; “The fascination of the fault” at the Kuzzam Palace in Saudi Arabia, and “The fascination of the fault” at the MACVAL, a contemporary art museum in Paris, France. His work has been exhibited in the most renowned institutions.
Dionisio Gonzales (Spain) 1965 (22-24)
Visual artist of recognized international prestige, whose work explores, in a targeted manner, the housing problems encountered by vernacular and irregular architecture, as well as the great constructive utopias of the post-war, which have failed. In short, these architectures exposed to collapse and blur. His work has been exhibited in the most recognized institutions and museums in the world
VF Art Projects
Spain & Luxembourg (2 rentals)
www.vfprojects.com
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