The earliest photography based portrayals of photographers themselves date back to the early steps of photography and its shaping contexts. One of the finest early portrayals of the self, and definitely one of the most haunting and peculiar ones, is from Hippolyte Bayard who was one of the originators of photography. However, at the time he was not celebrated as much as some of his colleagues. Following this, as a reaction of not being accorded the same kind of respect as Louis Daguerre, in 1840 Bayard pictured himself as a suicide victim in a photograph named Self Portrait as a Drowned man. In his studio, he undressed himself, wrapped only a light drape around his lower body, positioned himself in his chair playing dead and made a portrait of himself.

Bayard’s now 175-year-old photographic gesture could be contemporary, so fresh it appears in its style and approach. As an act of portrait making, it has had a great influence on self-portraits to come. In this beautiful picture, Bayard visualized his personal anxiety, vested his skill and tools for performing his disappointment and documented it photographically. This ability to carry multi-layered motives is in the central role in self-portraiture today.

The gestures towards the self  focuses on photographic performances by Finnish photographic artists as Elina Brotherus, Antti Laitinen, Aino Kannisto, Heli Rekula, Iiu Susiraja, Marja Helander, Kari Soinio, Marko Karo, Erica Nyholm y Harri Pälviranta. In the artworks included in the exhibition, artists’ bodies are treated as objects, tools and means to make art. Artists position themselves in staged or re-enacted settings, contexts that are playful and sometimes even humiliating. With this manner, the artists ask rather fundamental questions about the ethical issues, objectivity and documentary possibilities of self-portraiture. Often the artworks are both absurd and political at the same time: they may directly refer to body-political issues or questions of femininity or masculinity but simultaneously they express humanity and playfulness and make references to history of art and photography. They also underline the importance of nature to Finnish artists, whether understood as human nature or natural surroundings.

It is noteworthy that Finland has a very long and prosperous tradition of photographers photographing themselves. This tradition reached its golden era with women entering the photographic arts in the 1980s. Ever since photographic gestures towards the self has had a notable role in photographic arts in Finland.

Harri Pälviranta
Curator

The investigation within knowledge, the constant observation, the love towards archaeology, towards anthropology, but above all the vital passion towards photography, from photography, are the essential features of the work of Teresa Correa.

In her habitat, in the world she reflects on the deepest black, the traces of the past acquire complete sense. Loads of piled bones, the funerary bundles, the image of a jaw or a hand, or the busts made with anthropologic enthusiasm, are elements which acquire a new consistency before her lens; a genuine quality of beauty that superposes empirical knowledge.

In the course of memory involves a path through her vital, as well as her artistic journey. The dialogue established from the depths of an excavation, from the attractive secret of the museum archives, with the elements that create the spatial vision of black light or, with the funerary bundles recreated in the work of Millares or, in an even riskier way, with her own image, support a continuous dialogue with photography. A dialogue where the consistency and the immateriality of the image, are established as the constant axis of her work.

If light -metaphor of knowledge- constitutes the essential substratum in her investigation process, we should not be surprised when photography is understood in its most original concept (darkness-light), a binomial that allows Correa to establish a reflexive process in terms of human condition and its role within Nature. A vital path for, since the most immediate landscapes surrounding her, as well as the space within museums -where this nature is classified, ordered and labelled- become the places where this artist strings together her entire artistic speech.

The storage within museums such as the Canarian Museum and the Tenerife Museum of Archaeology constitute the spaces of knowledge, where Correa allows herself to break the limit and reveal the “visibly hidden”. Making us dig into the collective memory, through the unveiling of Busts of Human Races, which inevitably settled the foundations of a refuted anthropologic speech, exemplifying thus a euro-centrist dominating past.

At a time like this one, where constant uncertainty prevails and all the historical memory is threatened by forgetfulness; where the dividing line becomes more obscene, systemic and unfair, Correa, as a last request, invites us to profane the image. An act of resistance, in so much as it reverts anthropological time with a boundary work, with the only intention of asking ourselves about the validity of a hegemonic obsolete speech which, tragically, settled the foundations of all racial discrimination.

A visual anthropology which, although universal, it does not stop being autobiographical.

Ángeles Alemán – Raquel Zenker

The exhibition depicts a sea journey from Spain to South America, almost following the Trail of Columbus’s 2^nd expedition to the New World. The display is comprised of 21 photographs taken over the course of a 21-day long ocean cruise, which show waves or rather their typology.

The subject doesn’t play the main part here. I focus on the theoretical and aesthetical assumptions, in a way autonomous in relation to the depicted reality. The works are continuation of a discourse between an individual and contemporary photography. Formally, aesthetics, being also the content, is the focal point of the collection and is an attempt to describe the modern aesthetics in a broader light. I further carry out my research on the blurred line between photography and painting. The theme is secondary albeit still quite relevant. I am not drawn to contextual critique of the reality, which then is translated into the visual language. My intention is not to create art but to find it, notice it, grasp it.

Experiencing the ocean and the distance responds to those requirements. Thematically, the presented reality has been heavily reduced, through which the reality can be shown fully, typologically but still in a general perspective. A deep and overtaking experience of sailing the ocean for the very first time on a greater scale is an essential part of the project. I don’t stop to work with the digital image – it’s not the primal cell phone model aesthetics, as it happened in case of the previous project. I turn to a professional cult 5D Mark II DSLR. The main motif here is structure, light and color.

You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. The exhibition speaks of the search of new ideas, resignation from the established forms as well as freedom and open-mindedness. The ocean is infinite, live, floating, constantly changing its surface, yet remains coherent in spite of its diversity.

I lived and worked in the region of the Balkans, Turkey and the Caucasus for more than a decade. My work focuses on the junction between chronicle and fiction, exploring ideas around concepts of borders, land, memory, desire,identity and history. I am interested in the telling of history, and in notions around periphery and edge. For me photography is a process of literacy, a journey of understanding.

Vanessa Winship

The photography of Vanessa Winship (born Barton-upon-Humber, 1960) establishes a dialogue with the mark left by the late twentieth century on people and the places they pass through: long processes defined by movements of fracture and integration, the instability of frontiers and the reaffirmation of identities. Her images, some of which are accompanied by short texts, offer a poetic gaze that is less immediate (but longer lasting) than that of photo-journalism, focusing on the effect of history on everyday life.

From the time she embarked on her project in the Balkans in the late 1990s up to her most recent work in Almería, Winship has focused on places in which human presence and the landscape seem to defy geo-political limits and historical events. All the potential and the documentary content of her photography thus shifts towards more intimate concepts such as vulnerability, the body and biography. Her series reveal the way in which physical features, clothing, customs, legacies, national and racial affiliations and governmental orders are inscribed on the skin. This is also the case with the way in which each unchanging landscape resists history or imprints on itself the wounds of a recent past through the ruined vestiges of political or social projects.

This dual nature, located between documentary research and personal investigation, is crucial to Winship’s work. Whether her images depict the immediacy of a moment that almost escapes the gaze or are based on a model posing, there is an element of authenticity, capable of generating a sentiment of what is common to all of us and shared through a gaze cast on the seemingly alien and distant.

Carlos Martín García
Curator

El ciclo Inter-video reúne un variado panorama de narrativas y experiencias formales y conceptuales del vídeo arte contemporáneo. Las obras seleccionadas están articuladas en cuatro programas que reflexionan en torno a las ideas de antropología, memoria y temporalidad; identidades colectivas/identidades individuales; apropiaciones y ficciones; tiempo/espacio.

Comisaria: Yolanda Peralta Sierra

Programa 1: ANTROPOLOGÍA, MEMORIA Y TEMPORALIDAD.
1 de diciembre de 2015, 19.00 h

Kyungwoo Chun (Corea del Sur, 1969)

18 x 1 Minute, San Sebastián, 2004.

Antonio Perumanes (España, 1963)

Mortaja, 1995.

Ana Teresa Ortega (España, 1952)

Visiones de ignomínia, 2005

Rui Calçada Bastos (Portugal, 1971)

Studio Contents, 2005.

Programa 2: IDENTIDADES COLECTIVAS / IDENTIDADES INDIVIDUALES
19 de enero de 2016, 19.00 h

Marina Nuñez (España, 1966)

Sin título (Monstruas), 2005

Willie Doherty (Reino Unido, 1959)

Non-specific Threat, 2004

Anthony Goicolea (Estados Unidos, 1971)

Classroom, 2002

Tiago Carneiro da Cunha (Brasil, 1973)

Low Attention Span – High Curiosity Rare, 2000.

Programa 3: APROPIACIONES Y FICCIONES
16 de febrero de 2016, 19.00 h

Martin Sastre (Uruguay, 1976)

Montevideo-The Dark Side of the pop, 2004.

Carles Congost (España, 1970)

That’s my impression!, 2001.

Andrew Gaston (Reino Unido, 1971)

Heaven & Hell, 2003

Rui Calçada Bastos (Portugal, 1971)

Quadrifoglio, 2001.

Programa 4: TIEMPO/ESPACIO
1 de marzo de 2016, 19.00 h

Sergio Belinchón (España, 1971)

Space I, 2004

Aitor Ortiz (España, 1971)

Sin título (El espacio recuperado: “Tabacalera”), 2005.

Rachel Reupke (Reino Unido, 1971)

Parc Naturel, 2003

Michael Najjar (Alemania, 1966)

The invisible city. Serie NNetropolis (2003-2005)

«Instituto», Vera Martín Zelich

This project revolves around the portrait, linking two elements: a space that defines and delimits a context, and an age group, that also defines and delimits the type of subject.

This work, developed in serial format, although not exclusively so in formal terms, is based on the study of some of the essential tools in the genre of portraiture: the face, as an expression of the individual, the look, as a means of communication, and the pose, as an affirmation.

The space chosen is the high school, a point of reference that establishes the age group on which the series hinges: the transition between adolescence and youth, the stage of the formation and affirmation of the individual. High school is one of the places where people at this age spend most of their time, and also where they interact, are educated and develop. It has been selected, therefore, as a familiar context in which those featured develop, the spaces that they use and experience. Look and pose, as components of expression, within surroundings that are familiar to them at that age, and complex and rich in connotations for the viewer of these images. The work is not only a portrait of individuals but of a space too, the high school. At the same time, it is not only a portrait of an isolated group of individuals but of a generational group linked by a relationship with a space common to them all. Furthermore, this series was completed entirely in the same high school, and all of those featured are the same students in the time prior to the end of the period.

The work seeks to challenge double portraiture of this group of high school students, the individual and the group, with those stereotypes and archetypes that usually develop in this age group.

«Raiponce», Marie Maurel de Maillé

“The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales.”
Walter Benjamin

The tales have a symbolic and deep impact; they teach us advice, forgotten and unconscious knowledge passed down from generation to generation.This project, Raiponce, refers to the homonym tale of the brothers Grimm.I tried to revisit it through the prism of the filiation, because it turns out that the time of its realization coincided with my first pregnancy.I always had an interest for the idea of transmission but this interest took in this specific case a particular and concrete content.

All my work is taken in a fictional imagination. Most of these photos were taken in museums where most of the time it reactivates a memory (Casa Museo Picasso, Castle of Pau, Museum of the Romanticism of Madrid). In these places of monstration, where an imaginary reconstructs, the public participates in the fiction. I hope to pass this narrative load of the tale by blowing in my images this tension between their apparently documentary aspect and the evocation of an atmosphere staged until the tense silence of the disappearance, without specifying in the image if it comes from a set or from an already constituted representation.

«The Mass is ended», Andrea Di Martino

The Mass is ended

What fascinates me in the photography of architecture, which is often static, inanimate and devoid of human presence, is the ability for me to imagine life. In this sense, deconsecrated churches are richly evocative places: they recall sacred life, rebirth and profane life. In Italy there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of deconsecrated churches scattered all over the country. Many are neglected and often forgotten. In recent years, however, there has been an increasingly common policy for the recovery and renovation of formerly consecrated churches, putting them to new use. What is surprising is the wide variety of reuses, the most diverse and unthinkable. My project started from here: to document these places in their new identity and their new life.

For five years, from 2008 to 2013, I travelled across the country looking for deconsecrated and transformed churches. I explored every Italian region to find the most interesting and surprising new uses, searching for innovative architectural solutions as well as the most practical adaptations for people who, for example, just needed a place to work. Along the way I discovered stories that revealed Italy in many facets: refined and superficial, trendy and popular, rule-breaking and believing. I photographed more than 70 churches. I chose to have the same point of view, the same perspective, the same square format. Just one photograph for each church to show the contrast between the different lives of these special places.

Alby Álamo

In November 2012, my friend Franchoinvited me to «The Cult», as he himself once called it. The Cult was a Brazilian evangelical mass in Berlin at which a pastor was to be ordained. The first thing I asked Franchowas if I would be able to bring my camera, to which he replied that I could. I did not know what to expect and had no idea if the invitation would lead to any material for a video.

The camera acted as a shield and helped me keep a distance from events, but I realised straight away that there were many things going round in my head there. One of them was the importance of images in such small communities, and the role they played and how they worked. Although in a mass like this one, the images themselves were not physically present, but appeared in many other ways through rituals, gestures and the setting itself.

When I started to edit all the material, I realised that the story would need to be told throughwords. It made sense to me that a rite based on sacred texts should also be similarly described. The narrative thus acquired a central role in the video in the form of my voice in first person, but I wanted that voice to raise questions separately from the figure of the all-knowing narrator. This is how the first person became a fictional character, calling for the viewer’s belief in the story, and sometimes even asking them to form the images for themselves that I was unable to record.

In the video, therefore, we see a fictionalized documentary (and which are not?) where the viewer’s relationship with the story told is rather like that of a believer with a sacred text.

De esta forma en el video asistimos a una documental ficcionalizado (¿acaso no lo son todos?) en el que la relación del espectador con la historia contada se asemeja en gran medida a la del creyente con los textos sagrados.

Matías Costa «Zonians»

In this exhibition, Matias Costa returns to an interest in territory, identity and memory, all of which are recurring themes in his photographic work. This body of work is akin to anthropological research into a community on the point of extinction.

For almost a hundred years, thousands of Americans lived comfortably in tranquil, tropical communities on the banks of the Panama Canal. They were known as Zonians, and they were responsible for the maintenance of one of the greatest feats of engineering in the world, until its return to Panama in 1999. Since then, they have met annually in Florida to remember their lost paradise, and they know that when they disappear their community will be extinguished forever.

In the middle of the Panamanian jungle, a handful of Americans thought they had found the promised land. The Zonians were stripped of their privileges in 1999, when the Panama Canal ceased to be US territory. And thus ended nearly a century of colonial life in a territory where the Zonians lived in a bubble of self-sufficiency, under a kind of socialism sustained by the world´s greatest capitalist government.

After helping Panama to gain independence from Colombia early in the twentieth century, the US government assured the rights in perpetuity to a strip of land 16 km wide, called the Panama Canal Zone. Thus began the construction of one of the most ambitious engineering projects in history, turning the region into a strategic area for US interventionist policy in Latin America.

Since their departure, the Panama Canal Society organises an annual convention in Florida for the former inhabitants of the area so that they may recall the nostalgia of their lost paradise.

Today some young Zonians are returning to their childhood home in Panama, a century after the construction of the artery linking two oceans.

This series was made between 2011 and 2013 at the Panama Canal and in Orlando, and follows the footsteps of the Zonians and the last moments of their existence as a community.

Matias Costa has undertaken a creative work that is not intended to define, but to evoke, investigating doubts and uncertainties, concerns on issues which, intentionally or not, always recur: the uprooting, cultural transhumance, migration, the impossibility of a final destination or unmistakeable belonging, identity built on the fragmentary and the dispersed, re-adaptation and strangeness are issues that make Costa´s work a kind of archaeology of the memory.

He is a member of the British agency Panos Pictures and is represented by the Freijo gallery. He collaborates with media publications including The New Yorker and El País Semanal. He is a lecturer in Art Documentary Photography at the EFTI, TAI and LENS schools Madrid.