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why

PHOTO BY JOAKIM ESKILDSEN

Joakim Eskildsen / Home # III (Denmark 2008-09)

Joakim Eskildsen is a Danish photographic artist and one of the most prominent figures of the Helsinki School. He has a particular interest in nature, and social and political themes. From the age of 14, Eskildsen began photographing the fields and forests around his home. In retrospective he describes how, even at a young age, it was a certain light or weather condition that inspired him. Since then, he has traveled through Europe, Africa, India, North and South America for projects, often spending extended periods of time in a place to document the life of the Roma, Cuba, or poverty in the US. Coinciding with the birth of his son, Eskildsen’s interest and focus has returned to that of his childhood. He describes a certain relief in photographing his immediate surroundings again, rediscovering what first drew him to photography – an artistic homecoming. As soon as his son and later his daughter learnt to walk, they would appear in the images. The children became an essential part of “Home Works” from which this image is taken – an ongoing project that is in its 15th year, the age of Eskildsen’s first child, and his seventh home. The series is divided into seven parts accordingly, starting from Finland, Denmark, and Germany, the last one being an old farm house South of Berlin.

what

PHOTO BY NIKITA TERJOSHYN

Nikita Teryoshin / from the series “space time discountinuum” (ongoing since 2009)

Nikita Teryoshin, born in Leningrad, raised in St. Petersburg and Dortmund and currently based in Berlin, is interested in the blurred space of surveillance and the self, and surveillance of the self: how we look and what we see. His work is influenced and inspired in this sense by the Russian writer Daniil Charms, a fellow citizen of St. Petersburg and a master of the Absurd which he chronicled in short literary sketches during the 1930s and 1940s. Teryoshin, like Charms, reflects on the interplay between the normal and the horror in the normal. The image that we present is a good example for this playful visual exploration of the unseen. Teryoshin started with taking a close-up photo of the eye one of his roommates. He then pinned this image to his door and poked a hole in it to use it to cover the peephole. This image is an image of that image with a hole. There is humor in this horror.

who

PHOTO BY STUART FRANKLIN

Stuart Franklin/MAGNUM/Agentur Focus / ANTARCTICA. Emperor penguins walking on the edge of the pack-ice, McMurdo Sound. 1990

This image has destruction built into it. Can we look at a photo of penguins, can we even perceive the Antarctic without immediately thinking about the climate crisis? Is there innocence possible in being in the position of the spectator? Or is this position gone – the innocence, the objective, the passive? Does everyone need to reflect, to react, to take responsibility? We are all in this together, after all. In the 30 years since Stuart Franklin took this photo, humankind has produced almost half of all the CO2 ever emitted. In Franklin’s powerful image you can feel the ice melt beneath the helpless birds’ feet. They seem sad, those three figures, as if creatures from a Beckett play. They seem to know. But, really, the sadness is ours. We all knew.

where

ARTWORK BY UGO RONDINONE

Ugo Rondinone: Seven Magic Mountains, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2016. Photo by Gianfranco Gorgoni. Courtesy of Nevada Muse- um of Art and Art Production Fund.

Ugo Rondinone’s colorful large-scale, public artwork Seven Magic Mountains was a two-year exhibition located in the desert outside Las Vegas, Nevada. It featured seven thirty to thirty-five-foot high dayglow totems comprised of locally-sourced, painted boulders. Visible across the desert landscape along the Interstate 15, Seven Magic Mountains offers a creative critique of the simulacra of destinations like Las Vegas. According to Rondinone, the location is physically and symbolically mid-way between the natural and the artificial: the natural is expressed by the mountain ranges, desert, and close-by Jean Dry Lake; and the artificial by the highway and the constant flow of traffic between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. In his art, Rondinone creates the conditions for an expansive emotional range. His work is celebrated for his ability to channel both psychological expressiveness and profound insight into the human condition, and the relationship between human being and nature.
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