Awoiska van der Molen

Work from The Living Mountain.

“…Awoiska van der Molen’s audiovisual installation The Living Mountain (2022) shows the grand landscapes of the Südtirol Alps in Austria, the homeland of Thomas Larcher, composer of the accompanying music. In this compelling work, Van der Molen’s atmospheric black-and-white photography and the experimental score merge as often as they collide with the music, revealing the monumentality and fragility of the mountains. The promise of untouched nature is close at hand, and it is appealing to lose ourselves in a sensory installation like this, which Van der Molen is making for the first time in her long photographic career…” – Iris Sikking from Contested Landscapes at Kunsthalle Mannheim

Mark Ruwedel

Work from Westward.

“Ruwedel is an artist who has been photographing American deserts and other remote locations for over 25 years, pursuing epic-scaled projects on railroad construction, Pre-Columbian sites, the landscapes of nuclear weapons, and more recently, failed attempts to live in the harsh environment of the desert.

With an affinity for stark, barren landscapes that are otherwise uninhabited, Ruwedel found solace in the desert as it soon became his primary field of inquiry to explore subtle perceptions about the historical versus contemporary in landscape photography.

Influenced by photographers Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams, Ruwedel’s works do not only overlap the ideas of the landscape and histories the place represents, but also the histories of picture-making. He uses land as a suitable place for social inquisition by studying each intricate history of the American or Canadian West and producing mesmerizing black-and-white photographs of the grades, cuts, tunnels, trestles, and craters of his immediate surroundings to reveal narratives—both geological and human—contained within. The images are wrought with history as the land reveals itself as being both an agent of geological processes and a field of human endeavor.” – Mark Ruwedel

Ugo Rondinone

Work from his oeuvre.

“Ranging from installations and sculptures to psychedelic paintings and large-scale drawings, Ugo Rondinone’s eclectic practice explores the relationships between opposing forces—day and night, real and artificial, euphoria and depression. His most recognizable works are his colorful “Rocks” sculptures: vertically stacked rocks painted in fluorescent colors. Inspired by naturally occurring geological formations and the meditative art of rock balancing, Rondinone has built these large-scale artworks in public settings around Liverpool, Miami, and the Nevada desert. He has created smaller iterations for gallery exhibitions. Rondinone has also made bull’s-eye-shaped, neon-hued mandala paintings and cast-bronze sculptures…” – Artsy

Torkwase Dyson

Work from A Liquid Place.

“Torkwase Dyson describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure and architecture. Dyson’s abstract works are visual and material systems used to construct fusions of surface tension, movement, scale, real and finite space. With an emphasis on the ways black and brown bodies perceive and negotiate space as information, Dyson looks to spatial liberation strategies from historical and contemporary perspectives. She seeks to uncover new understandings of the potential for more livable geographies, recognizing that many landscapes, infrastructures, and built environments were actively shaped to devalue Black life.

Liquid A Place is part of an ongoing series that started from the premise that we are the water in the room, inviting viewers to consider their bodily interconnection with rivers and oceans that surround us. After all, around 60 percent of our bodies and 70 percent of the planet is water, and these waters circulate across our bodies and the planet as they shift states from solid to liquid to gas.

For this iteration of Liquid A Place, Dyson creates a monumental sculpture that is a poetic meditation connecting the memory of water in the body and the memory of the water in the desert. How do we go to the water in our bodies to harvest memory? Can this liquid memory help us reconsider scale and distance as critical forms in holding onto liberatory life practices? What kind of scalable infrastructure can our bodies resist and invent, making cities more livable? How are new geographies formed from the architecture of our bodies?” – Desert X

Farah Al Qasimi

Work from Arrival.

“Arrival, Farah Al Qasimi’s third solo exhibition at The Third Line. Using the language of horror cinema, Al Qasimi reveals a new body of work featuring jinn folklore across the UAE.

“The show premieres Farah’s first feature-length film; a 40 minute horror-comedy titled Um Al Naar (Mother of Fire). In it, a fictional Reality TV network has produced a segment on Um Al Naar, a Ras Al Khaimah-based Jinn. Um Al Naar narrates the region’s changes from its occupation by Portuguese and British naval forces to its current adoption of a national identity based around tolerance and a drive to generate culture. She pays close attention to these changes in their day-to-day iterations: the gendered pastimes of the country’s youth, waning trust in traditional forms of spirituality and medicine, and the loss of history in an urgent bid for novelty.

The photographs in the exhibition are moments pulled from the world she describes. She follows a baker with an Instagram business making buttercream roses, dance parties in which the only participants are men, and moves throughout homes looking at indicators of bodies and their personal style. Um Al Naar laments the formalities and social constructs of modern-day life, longing for a more fluid, interconnected world in which there is ample space for the paranormal, the unseen, and the absurd…” – Third Line Dubai

John Pfahl

Work from Altered Landscapes.

“In his series Altered Landscapes, Pfahl physically changes the environment, fabricating the view to question our perception of the landscape through added elements that reference mark-making devices associated with photographs, maps, plans, and diagrams. These gestures sometimes repeat strong formal components; fill in information suggested by the scene, or act upon information external to the photograph itself. The picturesque scenes are at once interrupted and completed by the artist’s involvement in creating the photograph.” – Joseph Bellows Gallery

Ron Jude

Work from 12HZ.

“The title of this work references the limits of human perception—12 Hz is the lowest sound threshold of human hearing. It suggests imperceptible forces, from plate tectonics to the ocean tides, from cycles of growth and decay in the forest, to the incomprehensibility of geological spans of time. The photographs in 12 Hz allude to the ungraspable scale and veiled mechanics of these phenomena, while acknowledging a desire to gain a broader perspective, beyond the human enterprise, in a time of ecological and political crisis.

12 Hz consists of large-scale black and white images of lava tubes, tidal currents, river water and welded tuff formations: pictures describing the raw materials of the planet, those that make organic life possible. The photographs up to this point have been made in the state of Oregon, from the high lava plains in the Deschutes National Forest to the gorges in the Cascade Range, and the sea caves and tide pools near Cape Perpetua on the Oregon coast.

Jude’s new work affiliates him with the ethos of the Dark Mountain Project, a cultural movement that grew out of a manifesto written in 2009 by the English writers Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine. Among the principal concerns of this movement is the urgent conviction that literature and art need to pivot away from “the myth of human centrality,” and to “re-engage with the non-human world.” In doing so, this work asks: how does one depict the indifference of the non-human world to our egocentrism and folly without simply offering false comfort by looking away from our reckless actions? Is it possible to engage the landscape in a meaningful way without resorting to formal trivialities, moralizing or personal narrative?

These photographs don’t attempt to tell us how to live or what we’ve done wrong, nor do they reduce the landscape to something sentimental, tame and possessable. Rather, they endeavor to describe and reckon with forces in our physical world that operate independently of anthropocentric experience. The photographs in 12 Hz work in service to a simple premise: that change is constant, whether we are able to perceive it or not.” – Ron Jude

Riitta Ikonen and Karoline Hjorth.

Work from Eyes as Big as Plates.

“Eyes as Big as Plates began in 2011 as a collaborative project between Norwegian-Finnish artist duo Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen. Initially conceived as a play on characters from Nordic folklore, the project has grown to over 150 portraits created in 17 countries across five continents. The duo works through complementing skills through photography, wearable sculpture and text, with a core mission to highlight dialogue on radical system change on interspecies relations.

Hjorth and Ikonen photograph their collaborators, often individuals actively involved or impacted by effects of this era of mass extinction: Farmers, surfers, grandmas, citizen scientists, rewinding experts, wild boar hunters, mycologists, philosophers, etc. outdoors, camouflaged in organic materials sourced from their surroundings. Each portrait is a dialogue between the collaborator and their living environment, capturing the individual’s belonging to the so-called ‘nature’ and questioning the boundaries between beings.

To the artists, the final portrait is the bonus to the encounter with the protagonists in the images. The core of Eyes as Big as Plates is always about the meetings. Each portrait starts with a conversation, which is steered by the collaborator. The duo’s main job is to listen. From the conversation, the location and material for the sculpture arrives as a joint idea, resulting in a final portrait and text that are equally important…” – Eyes as Big as Plates

Victoria Sambunaris

Work from her oeuvre.

“For over 25 years, Victoria Sambunaris has structured her life around a photographic journey traversing the American landscape. Equipped with a 5×7 inch field camera, film, a video camera and research material, she crosses the country alone by car for several months per year. Her large-scale photographs document the continuing transformation of the American landscape with specific attention given to expanding political, technological and industrial interventions.

In addition to her photographs, her collected ephemera form the essential and incidental elements of the work as a photographer and researcher. This work includes video documentation of experiences and observations on the road: snapshots, maps, road logs, journals, geology and history books, mineral specimens and artifacts.” – Victoria Sambunaris

Josephine Pryde

Work from The Splits at The CAC – la synagogue de Delme.

“In preliminary discussions with the artist, the curator expressed enthusiasm for an exhibition exclusively of photography. He felt that not only had there never been such a display in the building, but he also remained interested in how Josephine Pryde deployed photography in her artwork, perceiving in it various types of resonance and slippage with respect to what he would otherwise assume to be more mundane characteristics of the medium. Josephine Pryde made several visits to the centre d’art contemporain – synagogue de Delme, and came to agree with him that an exhibition containing only photographs would be indeed the direction to take.

The Splits is the result. In it, you will see frames containing one, two or four images, using mirroring and repetition of motifs throughout. Yet the images are also different from one another, are frequently juxtaposed against each other inside one frame, and fall into four distinct categories, which, for the sake of convenience, have been called: Foreboding, Dilemma, Instrument, and Split (or, Sand).

There are several views of two different, but both elaborate, hairstyles. These were created by Sergio Renis, an accomplished hairdresser invited by the artist. The model was Laffy, from the uns* talent agency. The creations are shot from behind, each under different lighting arrangements. They are not the sort of hairstyle you would usually prepare to wear down the street. Are they art? Where is fashion? They sit, prosthetic, a self turned into a haircut. The lighting, in combination with the materials and forms, gives variously an impression of powdery tumours of aristocratic dust, artifice pocked by airy cloud, or of wired-up natural fronds, streaked through with blurry, slippery strands of underwater alienation.

These images are punctuated by panels showing sand, as if to provide both an interruption and a ground, with slight movements perceptible across frames. Visible in some is the slim edge of what could be a phone – with a jack socket, so not new – a model that, while ageing, is still in use, rising here from the surface of the grains, shot soft, rotating, on vibrate.

Where to perceive the Splits of the title? The composition of this very text with which to announce the exhibition has proven a challenge in respect to battling dissociation. How not to forget about the artwork while promoting the show? How to acknowledge the materials used through all stages? How to develop theories derived from that experience, as well as from the sight of the work, its level of content, its production and forthcoming installation, and to put all this into language for distribution? How to navigate the mutations, the multiplications, the flips and juxtapositions that are the properties of images, of files, of scans, of photographs? The potentials of infinity? How to take a long, hard look at the impulse in such texts to insist upon something that would call itself ‘relevance’? Relevance to time, to space, to technology… How on earth? Relevance, a word with its roots in a raising up, and a repeating of same, an etymology which recalls the strain to elevate, in order to make claims, in order to send a petition to belong to the present. But the present fragments! The petition is ineligible!

The Splits experiments in the field of such questions and exclamations, through deployment of barely perceptible displacements and repetitions, through the example of some hair fashions, and their confections and contrivances – becoming merely one site of appeal amidst the dislocated communications of an unsettled present.” The CAC – la synagogue de Delme