WANAFOTO: Her Ground: Women Photographing Landscape @ Flowers Gallery, London - Lisa Barnard, Maja Daniels, Rikke Flensberg, Scarlett Hooft Graafland, Mona Kuhn, Kristin Man, Anastasia Samoylova, Corinne Silva, Dafna Talmor

20/07/19

Her Ground: Women Photographing Landscape @ Flowers Gallery, London - Lisa Barnard, Maja Daniels, Rikke Flensberg, Scarlett Hooft Graafland, Mona Kuhn, Kristin Man, Anastasia Samoylova, Corinne Silva, Dafna Talmor

Her Ground: Women Photographing Landscape - Lisa Barnard, Maja Daniels, Rikke Flensberg, Scarlett Hooft Graafland, Mona Kuhn, Kristin Man, Anastasia Samoylova, Corinne Silva, Dafna Talmor
Flowers Gallery, London
Through 31 August, 2019

LISA BARNARD

Santa Filomena, Andes, Peru, 2016

Orotone made with Fairtrade Gold leaf from SOTRAMI

with Kozo Washi Gampi paper

Flowers Gallery presents a group exhibition of work by female photographers. Her Ground uses landscape as a thematic focus to consider relationships between genre and gender. The term landscape, a principle category in Western art, is used in relation to the visible features of an area of land, often depicting human relationships to place and the environment. This exhibition looks at the specificity of viewpoint, addressing the visibility of women’s narratives and perspectives in photographic images of the landscape.

Her Ground includes nine international contemporary artists, each approaching ideas of landscape in different ways. Their varied perspectives invite questions around how we define our landscape today and the connections to be found between landscape and cultural identity. Many works on view explore notions of power, agency and sexual politics, concerning the control, access and definition of land. Often the landscape is presented in fragmented or constructed forms, incorporating a revised visualisation of landscape through mythology, memory and the imagination.

British artist LISA BARNARD’s most recent project The Canary and the Hammer traces the history of gold, and its role in humanity’s ruthless pursuit of progress. Created in response to the financial crisis of 2008, Lisa Barnard uses gold as a prism through which globalism can be refracted, embarking on a personal journey across the world to reflect on how this ubiquitous material substance acts as a barometer of our changing times. Working across various thematic strands or chapters, connecting stories from the mania of the gold rush to the high tech industry, Lisa Barnard’s project incorporates images of the Peruvian mining landscape to explore the sexual politics of the supply chain. Lisa Barnard’s photographs show the practice of women known as pallaqueras, driven to the edges of Peruvian mines by pervading superstitions, to extract minerals from stones discarded by male peers. Lisa Barnard’s ambitious project is the subject of a new book published by MACK in September 2019.

Lisa Barnard, The Canary and The Hammer

MACK, September 2019

Silkscreened hardcover

200 pages, 20 x 29 cm

ISBN 978-1-912339-33-4

MAJA DANIELS is a Swedish photographic artist whose work can be described as a multi-layered academic and artistic practice that includes photography, sociological methodology, sound, moving image and archive materials.Her most recent project Elf Dalia is a book and film project in Älvdalen, Sweden, a rural community in the far North of the country, which has one of the oldest surviving languages. The series explores the landscape and its mythologies through Daniels’ own photographs and an appropriated local archive of images amassed by a local inventor and photographer Tenn Lars Persson (1878 –1938) who was interested in astrology, alchemy and the occult. In her uncanny photographs of life in this isolated region surrounded by woods, mountains and lakes, Maja Daniels’ images evoke the mysticism and dark spirits of the past, shrouded by its history as the origin of the notorious witch trials in 1668. The book was published by MACK.

MAJA DANIELS

Self-Portrait/Totem Study nr 02, 2018

Giclee print

Maja Daniels, Elf Dalia

MACK, April 2019

OTA bound paperback with flaps

136 pages, 22 x 29 cm

ISBN: 978-1-912339-37-2

Danish photographer RIKKE FLENSBERG’s latest series O presents a fluid world of bodies and landscapes, in which a playful approach to scale generates new relationships and interactions between humans and the environment. Fragmented body parts resemble topographical surfaces, while images of the landscape rupture to create biomorphic forms. The title of the series refers to the zero point, from which new readings and meanings can develop, combining both natural and cultural features.

RIKKE FLENSBERG

Darkness is Empty Space, 2015,

Fine art print

Dutch artist SCARLETT HOOFT GRAAFLAND has described using landscape as a stage for a performance or installation. Scarlett Hooft Graafland’s carefully choreographed, site-specific sculptural interventions and performances take place in some of the most remote corners of the earth and are made in collaboration with isolated communities in those regions. Over the past decade she has explored the salt desert of Bolivia, the desolate Canadian Arctic, the remote shores of Madagascar and Vanuatu, and recently the United Arab Emirates, generating playful interactions that reflect and critique the exchange between nature and culture. The exhibition coincides with a major solo exhibition Vanishing Traces at Fotografiska, Stockholm.

SCARLETT HOOFT GRAAFLAND

Discovery, 2006

C-type print

LA-based artist MONA KUHN uses landscape to portray the complexities of human nature. Her series She Disappeared into Complete Silence was photographed at a golden modernist structure on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park, where nature, architecture, light and a single figure merge to create a surrealist mirage in the Californian desert wilderness. Using mirroring and refraction of light, Kuhn’s experimental abstraction of the landscape reflects the atmospheric mysticism and hallucinatory visions of the desert environment’s endless horizons. Works from this series have recently been shown in an expanded context as part of fully immersive site-specific installations involving a hybrid layering of sound, image projections and shimmering mirrored surfaces. She Disappeared into Complete Silence is published by Steidl.

MONA KUHN

AD6883, 2014

Chromogenic dye coupler print

Mona Khun, She Disappeared into Complete Silence
Steidl, November 2018
104 pages, 53 images
Open-spine softcover with a gilded top edge
23.7 x 31 cm
ISBN 978-3-95829-180-5

KRISTIN MAN was born in Hong Kong, and now lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. Her Fragments of Grey Matter series was photographed over a period of two years, creating images that oscillate between concrete figuration and emotive abstraction. The publication of the series won an award of Excellence at the Tokyo Type Director’s Club Awards in 2014, and was presented at the National Museum of Singapore. A selection of work from the series was exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions in Singapore, Palm Springs and New York art fairs and at the J.P. Morgan building, New York.

KRISTIN MAN

Bridge Under The Water, 2013

Photographic Print on Hahnemule paper

ANASTASIA SAMOYLOVA is a Moscow-born, USA-based artist, moving between observational photography, studio practice and installation. Her series FloodZone extends a longstanding interest in the differences between natural and constructed landscapes, and the role of images in the making of collective memory and imagined geography. These photographs were made in the southern United States, in areas at risk from rising sea levels. Anastasia Samoylova evokes the precarious psychological condition of a way of life that teeters between paradise and catastrophe. FloodZone is published by Steidl in September 2019.

ANASTASIA SAMOYLOVA

Façade in South Beach (Fountain), 2017

Dye sublimation print on aluminium

Anastasia Samoylova, FloodZone

Steidl, September 2019

136 pages, 86 images

Hardback / Clothbound

23.1 x 27.4 cm

ISBN 978-3-95829-633-6

CORINNE SILVA is a London-based artist using photography, video works and collaboration to disrupt prevalent modes of representing the landscape. Corinne Silva understands landscape to be a complex interrelation of culture, geography, politics and botany, living beings and inanimate matter. While Silva’s work is informed by historic precedents in landscape photography, she seeks a visual language that privileges fragmentation and interrelationships rather than an all-encompassing overview, responding to place in an embodied and subjective manner to create new narrative possibilities. In Garden State, Corinne Silva considers how gardening, like mapping, is a way of allocating territory. Over three years Corinne Silva travelled across Israel/Palestine, making photographs of public and private gardens in twenty-two Israeli settlements, which she presents as contributing to the reshaping and renaming of these contested lands. Garden State was published by the Mosaic Rooms and Ffotogallery in 2016.

CORINNE SILVA

Untitled from the series Garden State, 2014

C-type print

Corinne Silva, Garden State

Ffotogallery / The Mosaic Rooms, October 2016

156 pages, 53 images

Hardback, 21 x 22.5 cm

ISBN 978-1-87277-158-8

DAFNA TALMOR is a London-based artist whose practice encompasses photography, video, curation and collaborations. Her Constructed Landscapes transform colour negatives of landscapes initially taken as mere keepsakes through the act of slicing and splicing. The resulting photographs allude to an imaginary place, idealised spaces or virtual spaces that exist beyond their fractured surfaces. The act of physically merging landscapes from different parts of the world acts as a metaphor for the transitional nature of belonging in today’s globalised societies. The Constructed Landscapes blur notions of space, memory and time to create a space that defies specificity and reflects the transience of our contemporary world.

DAFNA TALMOR

Untitled (NE-04040404-1) from the Constructed Landscapes series, 2015

C-type handprint made from four collaged negatives

FLOWERS GALLERY
82 Kingsland Road, London E2 8DP
www.flowersgallery.com