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Dutch photographer DANA LIXENBERG has won the twentieth edition of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize at London’s Photographers’ Gallery, for her multifaceted portrait of the residents and community of the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts, Los Angeles.

 

She was announced as the 2017 winner of the prestigious £30,000 prize by broadcaster and writer, Ekow Eshun, at a special award ceremony at The Photographers’ Gallery.

 

Lixenberg started her project IMPERIAL COURTS (1993 – 2015) after the Los Angeles riots and has revisited and expanded her project over the following twenty-two years. In contrast to the often one dimensional and sensationalised media coverage, Lixenberg takes a more controlled and formal photographic approach, “slowing things down” – as she puts it. The project includes images from different years that follow the trajectories of individual stories. Over time, lives have been lost, people have disappeared or gone to jail, and the children of early photographs, have grown up and had children of their own. In later visits, Lixenberg started using audio and video recording to document the conversations and specific soundtrack of the neighbourhood. In this way, Imperial Courts charts the effects of a complex and evocative passage of time on an underserved community.

 

Imperial Courts (1993-2015), is published by Roma Publications (2015); the project also exists online as a web documentary, a multimedia space developed with collaborator Eefje Blankevoort.

 

Brett Rogers, Director, The Photographers’ Gallery and non-voting chair of the 2017 jury, said: “”We are delighted to announce this year’s winner as Dana Lixenberg. This comprehensive and measured series impressed all of the judges through its affirmation of photography’s power to address important ideas through pure image. Lixenberg’s work is simultaneously understated and emphatic, reflecting a cool sobriety, which allows her subjects to own the gaze and their contexts without sentimentality or grandiosity. Originally presented in book format, each portrait operates as a self-contained story. Dana Lixenberg has expertly harnessed the photographic medium to rethink stereotypical representation and empower a community with direct voice and visibility.”

 

Anne-Marie Beckmann, Director, Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, said: “We would like to congratulate Dana Lixenberg as the winner of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2017 and also thank The Photographers’ Gallery for the terrific partnership we have enjoyed for many years. On its’ twentieth anniversary, we are proud that the Prize has become one of the most prestigious awards in contemporary art. We are particularly pleased that the exhibition is touring internationally – and that it will open at Frankfurt’s MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst this summer and subsequently at the Aperture Foundation in New York – the first US exhibition of the Prize.”

 

The members of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2017 jury were: Susan Bright, Curator; Pieter Hugo, Artist; Karolina Lewandowska, Curator of Photography, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Anne-Marie Beckmann, Director, Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and Brett Rogers, Director, The Photographers’ Gallery as the non-voting chair.

 

Dana Lixenberg (b. 1964, Netherlands) lives and works in New York and Amsterdam. She studied photography at the London College of Printing and at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Lixenberg works on long-term projects, mostly focused on individuals and communities on the margins of society. These include Jeffersonville, Indiana, a collection of landscapes and portraits of the small town’s homeless population, and The Last Days of Shishmaref, which documents an Inupiaq community on an eroding island off the coast of Alaska. The power of her work is found in the intimacy of her images and the absence of social stereotyping. She has gained international recognition through her work for publications such as Vibe, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Newsweek and Rolling Stone. Her work has been widely exhibited and can be found in prominent collections. In addition to Imperial Courts 1993-2015 (2015), her books include Set Amsterdam (2011), The Last Days of Shishmaref (2008), Jeffersonville, Indiana (2005) and united states (2001). She is represented by Grimm Gallery in Holland.

 

All the nominated projects from the shortlisted artists for 2017, also including works by Sophie Calle, Awoiska van der Molen and Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs – will remain on display at The Photographers’ Gallery until 11 June 2017.

 

The exhibition then begins its tour to the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt from 29 June until 17 September 2017 and subsequently travels to Aperture Foundation in New York from 16 November 2017 until 11 January 2018. This exciting development marks the first US exhibition of the prize in its twenty-year history.

 

The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize is an annual award established by The Photographers’ Gallery, London, in 1997 and in partnership with the Deutsche Börse Group since 2005. Since 2016 it has been awarded together with the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, a non-profit organisation specifically focused on the collecting, exhibiting and promoting of contemporary photography. The £30,000 prize rewards a living photographer, of any nationality, for a specific body of work in an exhibition or publication format in Europe, which is felt to have significantly contributed to the medium of photography between 1 October 2015 and 30 September 2016.

 

2017 marks twenty years of the Prize and reaffirms its position as a barometer of talent, excellence and innovation. The award remains committed to showcasing photographers and works of all genres and approaches, which exemplify exceptional viewpoints and bold practice.

Since its conception in 1950, this prestigious award has been given to only two female artists (Brigitte Kowanz (2009); Maria Lassnig (1988)), making Bertlmann the third in its history. The Grand Austrian State Prize (German: Großer Österreichischer Staatspreis) is presented by the Minister of Culture on behalf of the Republic of Austria, to an individual who has shown an exceptional contribution to either literature, music, visual art or architecture. Since 1971, the prize has been given to only one person a year in one of the four categories.

Renate Bertlmann (b.1943, Vienna) is a leading feminist avant-garde visual artist, who since the early 1970s has focused on issues surrounding themes of sexuality, love, gender and eroticism within a social context, with her own body often serving as the artistic medium. Her diverse practice spans across painting, drawing, collage, photography, sculpture and performance, and actively confronts the social stereotypes assigned to masculine and feminine behaviours and relationships.

Her work has been the subject of many important institutional exhibitions and is included in various public collections. In 1975 she was included in the radical feminist exhibition MAGNA. Feminismus curated by VALIE EXPORT at Galerie St. Stephan, Vienna. In 2016, a comprehensive monograph of her work edited by Jessica Morgan and Gabriel Schor was published by Prestel.

Recent exhibitions include Renate Bertlmann: Two Climaxes, Richard Saltoun Gallery, London (2016); Renate Bertlmann: Amo Ergo Sum, Sammlung Verbund, Vienna (2016);The World Goes Pop, Tate Modern, London (2015) and Burning Down The House: The 10th Edition of the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2014).

MMK 3, Frankfurt, 29 June –17 September 2017

Starting in June, the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main will present the works of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize finalists for the second time.

The 2017 selection not only pays tribute to established photographic narratives but also honours experimental and conceptual approaches in documentary, landscape and portrait photography. All four finalists are concerned with issues such as truth versus fiction, what is certain or uncertain, what distinguishes the real from the ideal, or the relationship between observing and being observed.

The 2017 finalists are Sophie Calle, Dana Lixenberg, Awoiska van der Molen and the artist duo Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs. Their works will be on view at the Photographers’ Gallery in London from 3 March to 11 June 2017 before coming to the MMK 3 of the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt.

The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize is awarded annually to a contemporary photo artist who can be of any nationality, and who in the preceding year has made a significant contribution to photography in the form of an exhibition or publication in Europe. One of the world’s most prestigious photography prizes, it calls attention to pioneering tendencies in contemporary photography and features the artists whose works help shape the current international photography scene. The winner of this year’s prize is Dana Lixenberg.

The Grand Prix Images Vevey 2017/2018 Jury selected Peter Puklus with the project “The Hero Mother – How to build a house”.

The Jury was unanimous in selecting Peter Puklus for the Grand Prix 2017/18, for a truly original and intriguing proposal that draws universal issues of family and the performance of parental roles into the artist’s unique and compelling visual language. Puklus offered a multifaceted dossier of texts, drawings and embryonic photographic sketches that begins to describe a completely new and unseen body of work by an artist whose recent photobook, The Epic Love Story of a Warrior, has drawn so much attention and excitement. It is therefore in the view of the jury, the perfect moment for Puklus to step onto the larger public stage that Vevey offers. Puklus’ new work is the result of a complex, immediate and accessible process. It begins from very simple and identifiable notions of assumed masculine and feminine roles in society: motherhood (as a presumed heroic activity) and the father’s inclination to build and protect the family home. For Puklus, the dynamics of these roles are deconstructed and questioned. Visually, the symbols associated with the roles are broken down into constituent parts as the basis for a playful investigation, expressed as sculptural and performative photographic works. The resulting images are exciting, challenging and fun, and maintain a resolute sense of the symbolic riddles of modern life. From the initial proposal to the finished project, the jury looks forward to seeing Puklus take his own unique lexicon of the clichés of family life beyond the confines of the studio and transform it into an inspiring and engaging installation.

Peter Puklus:

Trained at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME) in Budapest and Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle in Paris, Peter Puklus (1980) currently lives and works in Budapest, where he is completing a PhD in Photography at MOME. In his books as well as his exhibitions, Puklus likes to focus on the narrative. He also strives to chart new territories beyond the field of photography by resorting to sculpture, drawing and video art.

Grand Prix Images Vevey is a creation-support grant for photography projects. The award, worth some CHF 40,000 (approx. EUR 37,000), enables artists to develop an original project. The winner now has one year to complete the project which will premiere at the next Festival Images Vevey from 8 to 30 September 2018.

Klemm’s, Berlin, APR 28 – JUN 10, 2017
Opening: Friday, APR 28, 2017 | 6–9pm

Special opening hours during Gallery Weekend Berlin:
Friday, APR 28 | 11 am – 9 pm
Saturday, APR 29 – Sunday, APR 30 | 11 am – 7 pm

What do images communicate without any indication of the source, location, or the motivation behind what
has been captured in them? Viktoria Binschtok achieves just such a situation in Cutting Straws at Midnight,
confronting us with a wild mix of decontextualized components that construct a reality all its own immanent to
the image and leaving the rest to our cognitive abilities. Sometimes loudly, sometimes quietly, these visual
clusters demonstrate their uncanny affinity based on the calculations of a machine and the incalculability of an
artistic gesture.

The precisely re-staged photographs, which always refer to already existing images, refuse to be easily
classified in standard genres by their artificial appearance—cuts, overlappings of several visual layers, and
elements that go beyond visual borders take up our screen-based habits of vision and move them to an offline
space. Still life or snapshot, professional or amateur photograph, private or public: all filters are turned off.
Networked visual information distracts us for a moment from our linear thinking in favor of a pleasurable
engagement with a medium that for a long time now has not only been instrumentalized politically, but has
become a yardstick for all of us in our culture of instant evaluation. It is the currency in the attention business,
always rising in value, yet its subtext is an old one: it could all be this way, but it could also be entirely
different.

Viktoria Binschtok lives and works in Berlin. Her works have been presented both in numerous solo and group
exhibitions, in recent years a.o. at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; C/O Berlin; KW Institute for
Contemporary Art, Berlin; Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy; Centre de la Photographie Genève, Switzerland;
pier24, San Francisco, USA; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Centre Pompidou, Metz, France; Schirn Kunsthalle,
Frankfurt am Main; Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg; Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia, The
Krasnoyarsk Museum Center, Siberia; Kunstverein Göttingen; Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig

Exhibition: Woman. Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970ies from the Sammlung Verbund Collection, 6. 5. – 3. 9., mumok, Vienna

From May 2017, mumok is presenting more than 300 artworks from the SAMMLUNG VERBUND collection that show how women artists in the 1970s first began to collectively redefine their own image of woman. As this significant artistic movement has been neglected in art histories to date, the collection director, Gabriele Schor, coined the term ”feminist avant-garde” and introduced it into art-historical discourse—with the aim of highlighting these artists’ pioneering work. This thematic exhibition at mumok and a comprehensive scholarly catalogue both contribute to expanding the male dominated avant-garde canon.

In the 1970s women artists emancipated themselves from the roles of muse and model, rejecting their status as objects in order to assert themselves as subjects actively participating in social and political processes. One-dimensional role ascriptions as mothers, homemakers, or wives were radically challenged—often using strategies of irony. Key themes were the discovery of female sexuality, the use of women’s own bodies, countering clichés and stereotypical images of women, the dictate of beauty, and creating awareness for violence against women. The women artists of this generation were united in their committed rejection of traditional normative notions of how women were expected to live. “It is exciting to see that these artists developed comparable strategies of the image, even though they did not all know each other,” Gabriele Schor explains.

The exhibition is divided into four sections:
The Reduction to Mother, Housewife, and Wife
Alter Ego: Masquerade, Parody, and Roleplays
Female Sexuality versus Objectification
The Normativity of Beauty

“It is important and fortunate for both the city of Vienna and mumok to be able to show these works on the feminist avant-garde from the SAMMLUNG VERBUND collection. These works complement mumok’s own collection with its focus on socially relevant art of the 1960s, such as Vienna Actionism—a movement that was implemented entirely by men. Here, many questions and issues were raised that were to play a role in the 1970s with a new and broader perspective—this time in developments that were largely implemented by women. In their works, they formulate answers to the ways in which men approached their work as artists. I am delighted to be able to present this significant collection at mumok,” says mumok general director Karola Kraus.

This exhibition is not a women’s exhibition, but a thematic exhibition. It brings together artists born between 1930 and 1958. There is a total of 48 European, North and South American artists, including eight Austrians: Renate Bertlmann (born 1943), Linda Christanell (born 1939), VALIE EXPORT (born 1940), Birgit Jürgenssen (1949–2003), Brigitte Lang (born 1953), Karin Mack (born 1940), Friederike Pezold (born 1945), and Margot Pilz (born 1936).

Conference: Feminist Avant-Garde, 6. 5., 2pm to 7 pm, mumok, Vienna, free entrance

The Centre Pompidou is delighted to announce the appointment of Florian Ebner as head of the Photography Department at the Musée National d’Art Moderne. The appointment becomes effective on 1 July 2017. Florian Ebner has worked for 25 years in photography and contemporary art. He was in charge of the photography department at the Folkwang Museum in Essen from late 2012, and was previously director of the Braunschweig Photography Museum from 2009 to 2012. In 2015, he was the curator of the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

The Centre Pompidou’s photography collection is one of the largest in Europe. Consisting of 40,000 prints and 60,000 negatives, it is one of the few collections in the world covering the entire history of modern and contemporary photography, particularly that of the 1920s and 1930s. Photography features largely within the museum’s modern and contemporary collection circuits, with nearly 400 photographs exhibited each year in its rooms. In late 2014, to provide a more spacious setting for various monographic, thematic and contemporary series, the Centre Pompidou opened the Galerie de Photographies: a 200 m2 area with free admission. It has staged eight exhibitions since then, and continues to provide the public with new interpretations or in-depth viewpoints highlighting the rich variety of the collection.

6. April – 18. June 2017, Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Zanele Muholi, Doireann O’Malley, Johannes Paul Raether, Chris E. Vargas

Wild – Transgender and the Communities of Desire is an international group exhibition that draws together recent artworks dealing with questions and challenges of transgender life and communities, don’t necessarily present an inquiry into the complexities of transgenderism, but rather in this particular constellation of artworks transgenderism appears as a perspective framing and narrating current human (societal) conditions.

Inspired by scholar Jack Halberstam’s concept of “wild,” the exhibition looks at how gender complexities are forever challenging the binary mode of societal organization. The exhibition claims that these complexeties should not be narrated as “problems” or “difficulties,” but rather as a wild range of human possibilities. As Halberstam reminds us the notion of wild— reclaimed from its colonial historical context—in relation to societal models, offers “different narratives of what a life can be like in general.” A powerful and potent critique can thus emerge from the margins of society, in this case through transgender voices, strategies, and perspectives. Many of the artworks in Wild restage the possibilities of envisioning a different future in the present and on the ruins of its impoverished political imagination.

Curators: Edit Molnár & Marcel Schwierin

CC Mechelen, March 25 – June 04, 2017

Opening: Friday March 24, 20:00

Curated by Kasper Andreasen

The exhibition Copy Construct departs from different artistic practices and specific works by artists that are based on ‘reproduction’ or ‘copy’. The selected works are inherent to the production of printed matter or artist’s books. This implies that different artistic media such as painting, drawing, photography, video, sculpture, and graphic design can manifest themselves through graphical problematics and their meanings. Alongside the 25 works of the artists, a little less than 300 books from the KASK collection (School of Arts, Ghent) and private collections from Belgium and England are displayed in the exhibition. The exhibition architecture is designed by Kris Kimpe and Koenraad Dedobbeleer and is accompanied by a publication, designed by Joris Dockx, which includes a bibliography of the exhibited books, different contributions by the artists, an interview with a book collector, etc.

With works by:

Kasper Andreasen, Peter Downsbrough, Vincent Geyskens & Jan Op de Beeck, Henri Jacobs, Jan Kempenaers, Kris Kimpe & Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Stephanie Kiwitt, Aglaia Konrad, Alon Levin, Sara MacKillop, Gregorio Magnani, Marc Nagtzaam, Willem Oorbeek, Frans Oosterhof, Ria Pacquée, Simon Popper, Guy Rombouts, Mitja Tušek, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (Club Moral) & the KASK Collection et al.,

and publications by:

Brumaria, Sébastien Conard, Arnaud Desjardins, De Enschedese School, Mekhitar Garabedian, Thomas Geiger (Mark Pezinger Verlag), Jef Geys, Groepsdruk (& others), Karl Holmqvist, Jochen Lempert, Louis Lüthi, Jurgen Maelfeyt, Mark Manders, Karel Martens, Tine Melzer, Dan Mitchell, Kristen Mueller, Olaf Nicolai, Sophie Nys, Quick Magazine, Kurt Ryslavy, Joachim Schmid, David Sherry, Erik Steinbrecher, Derek Sullivan, Elisabeth Tonnard, This Week, Erik van der Weijde, Maud Vande Veire, Gert Verhoeven, Leen Voet, Jan Voss, Fritz Welch

mumok and Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

July 30, 2017, is the third anniversary of Harun Farocki’s passing. To keep his work as a filmmaker and artist, and as an author and teacher, alive and also to make it available (anew) as a resource to a younger generation, Sabeth Buchmann and Constanze Ruhm, in cooperation with Jens Kastner, have devised a comprehensive series of lectures and events. As teachers, whose approach is close to Farocki’s own thinking and practice, Buchmann, Ruhm, and Kastner wish to readdress his work in film and as an author by focusing on his teaching activities. This relates to his highly influential role as a professor for film and art from 2004 to 2011 at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Farocki’s students profited greatly from his film analysis, with its accomplished use of film and media theory and political reflection; as did the interested general public that came to his screenings of his own films and of the films of others. In this sense, this program of events entitled Recognize and Pursue (relating to Farocki’s Erkennen und Verfolgen from 2003) which will take place within the auspices of a lecture series of the same name at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, will focus on Farocki’s profound interest in the relationships between image and politics and between practice and theory. It was not least Farocki’s own approach to teaching that made him a key influence on a young generation of artists and authors in particular in the field of documentary film.

Guests include Michael Baute (March, 29), Christine Lang (May 31), Thomas Elsaesser (June 14), and Sezgin Boynik (June 21). They will each compile and present a film program with a focus on a specific question connected with the work of Harun Farocki.

Lectures series at The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna: Jens Kastner (March 7), Antje Ehmann, Sabeth Buchmann, and Constanze Ruhm (March 14), Volker Pantenburg (March 21), Michael Baute (March 28), Tom Holert (April 4), Filipa César (May 2), Christa Blümlinger (May 9), Thomas Heise (May 16), Maren Grimm (May 23), Christine Lang (May 30), Diedrich Diederichsen (June 13), Sezgin Boynik (June 20).

Conceived by Sabeth Buchmann and Constanze Ruhm, in cooperation with Jens Kastner and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

April 2 – August 6, 2017, KINDL – Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst
Opening: April 1, 5 pm

The KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art is presenting the first comprehensive retrospective in Berlin of the Iranian artist Shirana Shahbazi (*1974, lives in Zurich). The exhibition will feature a selection of Shahbazi’s works from the past fifteen years, mostly consisting of photographs. The artist has created very heterogeneous groups of works in parallel: black-and-white landscapes, sumptuous still lifes, geometric abstractions, and documentary photographs. With some sixty works, the exhibition distils this spectrum into a visual cosmos of pictures that develops beyond categories such as stylistic similarity and logical temporal sequences.

As varied as the subjects are, Shahbazi’s pictures always also deal with photography itself, the particularities of the medium, the freezing of a moment, the materiality of things, and the cultural codings of representations, subjects, and places. Often her works take shape in processes of transformation—for instance, when the artist translates pictures from a trip from Zurich to Tehran into two-tone lithographic prints, or when she builds precise spatial objects, only to transfer them into an apparently abstract geometric photographic surface. In Shirana Shahbazi’s works, the capturing and constructing of reality thus becomes an opportunity for reflection about the codes and conventions inscribed in the visible.

A publication will accompany the exhibition.
The exhibition is curated by Andreas Fiedler.

11.03.2017 — 14.05.2017, West Den Haag

While, in a number of works, the artists show the repetitive element of film by putting innumerable similar scenes from various films after one another, they also have produced a large amount of works revolving around one single emblematic motif. On one hand this invites the viewer to critically reflect on standards of cinematic representation. On the other hand, Girardet and Müller liberate their footage from its original source and serving function in offering it a new life. All the time the videos show incisive observations of both specific and generic phenomena in film which of course simultaneously reflect certain stereotypes and notions valid in the world where they originated. The way they are edited regularly make for certain ironic overtones and also abstract recognizable situations towards a more alienating reality.

Christoph Girardet’s & Matthias Müller’s solo show in Huis Huguetan combines collective and individual works of the artists. One of the centrepieces is their film ,personne’, shown in an exhibition here for the first time. In various scenes the same man is being shown: alone, lost in thoughts, suffering from an identity crisis, encountering himself at another age, transforming into others at times. Images of dysfunctional devices – a crashed car, empty sheets of paper, broken glasses and of doors seemingly leading nowhere – seem to symbolize the passing of things, the emptiness of existence. What we see is the impact of a society pervaded with images of fear on an individual – that turns into somebody, nobody, anyone.

Christoph Girardet (1966) and Matthias Müller (1961) had solo shows at institutions such as Kunstverein Hannover; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Bozar – Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Solar – Galeria de Arte Cinemática, Vila do Conde; and Fotomuseum Winterthur. Their joint projects were also part of various group shows at institutions such as Deichtorhallen Hamburg; EYE, Amsterdam; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris – among others. Besides, the artists’ individual works were shown at esteemed institutions such as Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; and Tate Modern, London. Their films are regularly screened at international film festivals, including Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Rotterdam, Toronto, New York, and Oberhausen, where they have gained many awards.

February 21–22, 2017, TBA21, Augarten, Vienna

TBA21–Augarten, Vienna, February 21–May 14, 2017

Most sea stories are allegories of authority. In this sense alone politics is never far away. (Allan Sekula)

Allan Sekula: OKEANOS​ at TBA21–Augarten is a monographic exhibition exploring the legacy of Allan Sekula (United States, 1951–2013). Drawing from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) collection, the exhibition is charting the artist’s research into and investigation of the oceans, which make up most of our increasingly fragile hydrosphere. Okeanos is developed in collaboration with Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, Spain.

Allan Sekula grew up in the port town of San Pedro, California and since the 1970 his artistic and theoretical work critically and passionately investigated the exploitative geopolitical configurations and labor relations active on our seas and in the super ports that almost invisibly manage the shipment and distribution of goods throughout a highly interconnected world. The shipping industry, seemingly a relic of the first industrial revolution, today moves more than 80 percent of the world’s commodities and is thus not only a central but also a severely underregulated and disregarded site of globalization. Sekula’s indefatigable research into sea trade and the maritime space articulates the oceans’s pivotal function in the world’s industrial systems but also voices the vulnerability of its ecosystems and the social and personal precariousness of the actors engaged in sea-based industries.

Allan Sekula: OKEANOS​  brings together a selection of seminal works by the artist. The exhibition title is a nod to recent critical thinking about our planet converging around the figure of Gaia, the goddess of the earth, born at the dawn of creation. According to the myth, her son Okeanos ruled over the oceans and waters and thus counters the terrestrial focus of even the most advanced discourses on the environment.

For TBA21 this exhibition marks a merging of themes from the past and future of its various programmatic components. The previous two exhibitions at TBA21–Augarten have both in different ways addressed current patterns of migration, in which the oceans and, in particular, the Mediterranean Sea have become sites of relentless political turmoil and human catastrophe. In addition, TBA21’s ongoing project The Current focuses on the oceans and the environmental degradation of the world’s waters. The research and discoveries that have grown out of The Current’s recent expeditions and other activities will culminate in the exhibition Tidalectics at TBA21–Augarten immediately following OKEANOS​ . Sekula’s legacy, his pointed exploration of the sometimes grim reality of global ocean-bound trade, serves as an urgent case study for understanding the interconnectedness of the environmental, political, and social struggles that play out across our oceans.
 
Before his death in 2013 Sekula pioneered an expanded critical photographic practice, alongside his engagements as a theorist, photographic historian, filmmaker, and educator. His work in all these fields was prolific and deeply political, embodying a profoundly thoughtful reflection on the nature of the image and its implications for the systems and institutions of archives. Reflecting his profound awareness of the shortfalls of documentary photography, his medium of choice, Sekula’s oeuvre reminds us that “the genre has contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy and nostalgia, and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world.” A photograph, for Sekula, is always “an ‘incomplete’ utterance,” threatened by the loss of specificity and dependent on the matrix of conditions in which it is embedded or from which it derives. His critical reading of the photographic practice and his attention to the contextual nature of the image are particularly evident in his large-scale, multipart works, at times divided into chapters, whose making spanned years of research and reflection and which were often combined with texts and publications. These larger investigative projects make Sekula’s oeuvre a deep study and comprehensive archive of the seas, charting complex networks of economics, politics, social conditions, and ecology and reshaping the system of knowledge itself.

Works in the Exhibition

Fish Story (1988–95), Sekula’s magnum opus, occupies a central position in the exhibition. Originally conceived as both an exhibition and a publication, this extensive work which is broken into nine chapters and is made up primarily of photographs and text panels, tells the story of the distribution of maritime power, following an ever-expanding constellation of ports, ships, factories, containers, and so on.

Also on view will be two films: Tsukiji (2001) and Lottery of the Sea (2006). The former describes a single day at a big fish market in Tokyo and traces the different stages through which the fish travel, from freezing to cutting and eventually to market, and the latter pulls together a variety of narrative threads, from sources as diverse as Greek mythology and American cinema, to explore the history and representation of life at sea and the (at the time) contemporary condition of seafaring. The work critiques (and takes its title from) Adam Smith’s concept of the “lottery of the sea,” which compares seafaring life to gambling, and equates property (ships, goods, etc.) and human life (the people working to facilitate the trade itself).

Also on display will be two photographic works from Sekula’s series Black Tide / Marea negra (2002–03). Here the artist documented the aftermath of the Prestige oil spill in 2002, a disaster resulting from the sinking of an oil tanker, which released 81,000 tons of oil into the ocean off the coast of Galicia, Spain, causing severe environmental damage to coastal regions in France, Spain, and Portugal. Large and small disasters (Islas Cíes and Bueu, 12-20-02) (2002–3) consists of three images showing the oil on various surfaces, and Self-portrait (Lendo, 12-22-02) (2002–03) shows Sekula at a disposal pit in Lendo.

15 FEBRUARY – 11 JUNE 2017, 
TATE MODERN,  LONDON, UK

Wolfgang Tillmans has earned recognition as one of the most exciting and innovative artists working today. This February, Tate Modern will present an exhibition concentrating on his production across different media since 2003. First rising to prominence in the 1990s for his photographs of everyday life and contemporary culture, Tillmans has gone on to work in an ever greater variety of media and has taken an increasingly innovative approach to staging exhibitions. Tate Modern will bring this variety to the fore, offering a new focus on his photographs, video, digital slide projections, publications, curatorial projects and recorded music.

Showcasing the importance of Tillmans’ interdisciplinary practice, the exhibition will particularly highlight the artist’s deeper engagement with abstraction and concentrates on his production across different media since 2003. Covering portraiture, landscape and still life, it will particularly highlight the artist’s deeper engagement with abstraction, beginning with his important work Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast I (2014).