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#28 cultura / natura

We shall attempt to define the theme of the upcoming Fotograf Festival from its middle point, at the borderline between culture and nature, and in relation to how that borderline is rewritten, to the points of overlap sought between them, and to the strange constellations in which artificial things become natural and natural artificial. It is no accident that it is these constellations, these ‘blue flowers’ (the image Walter Benjamin uses in reference to the presence of immediate reality in the world of film), that become such rewarding photographic objects. The camera brings us closer to nature but at the same time distances us from it. The attempt to capture nature in the lens of the camera can then be likened to the desire to understand a wild animal by placing it in a zoo or to learn about rare trees by planting them in a park or an exotic flower by visiting a greenhouse in a botanical garden. The naturalness of nature only comes to the forefront once we have experience its opposite; as Derrida points out, the awareness of nakedness is essentially human – animals are naked without knowing it.

The urge to return to nature is indelibly linked to the pervasiveness of technology in our lives. All around us irreversible processes are going on that are driven by momentary needs instead of long-term considerations. What do contemporary art and photography have to say about this and how do they say it?

#37 uneven ground — Profiles

Karol Radziszewski

Radziszewski’s art, in its multidisciplinary medley, is driven in its roots by a longing to carve out a space of diversity and queer beauty out of misery. Be it the secret queer meeting spots in communist Poland or the place for alternative narratives on history, it is constantly craving for a less miserable world…

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#37 uneven ground — Profiles

Heji Shin

Although the German-Korean artist Heji Shin attained wider popularity through her photographs for the Spring/Summer 2017 collection of the New York-based brand Eckhaus Latta, which featured explicit images of couples of varying ethnicities and sexual orientations engaging in sexual acts, the true scandal arrived with her portraits of the American rapper Kanye West, who recently elicited controversy through his relationship with the incumbent president of the United States…

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#37 uneven ground — Profiles

Karolina Wojtas

Polish artist Karolina Wojtas doubtless has a lot of fun creating her photographs and installations. This usually seems inconsistent with the depth of thought her photographs suggest. Even so, this is exactly what her photographs are: a fluid mix of various kinds of humor, bizarre elements, practical jokes, children’s jokes, and bullying…

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Taste Fotograf #37

#37 uneven ground — Profiles

Alžběta Bačíková

While Alžběta Bačíková’s experimental approach to documentary puts the transparency of the filmic medium in parenthesis, this self-reflexive attitude does not operate at the expense of creating an empathic relation between artist and protagonist, subject and viewer…

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#37 uneven ground — Profiles

Sidsel Meineche Hansen

One hot summer day, I happened to reach for H. G. Wells’s 1923 novel Men Like Gods. In it, Wells presents his idea of the world of Utopia. People here are precisely carved castings of ancient deities representing the ideal potential development of our society at some point millenia in the future…

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