Four of our selected artists share a common approach: each uses a specific location as a point of departure to develop a narrative that moves beyond geography itself.
Thero Makepe’s view of his home country, Botswana, is pessimistic. In his project It’s Not Going to Get Better, he denounces the corruption and economic inequality that have led to a growing sense of hopelessness and social division, fueled by a shift away from community toward the self. Makepe’s cinematic, staged compositions portray a sense of profound solitude - local anxieties that resonate globally.
Italian photographer Irene Ferri turns her lens toward the United States. In an era of tightened immigration laws and heightened border security, her project No Other Country but America feels more urgent than ever. By interrogating the contemporary “American Dream” Ferri captures a nation - and a world - in flux, marked by shifting geopolitical powers and major global conflicts.
While Ferri and Makepe look outward at the fracturing of nations, Natasha Lozinskaya’s project Treasure Trove turns inward. She returns to her native Vyatka Krai in the Russian hinterland in search for her own identity. There she finds refuge in a way of life where ancient traditions and newly forged myths coexist as they have for centuries. Through her intimate, delicate images, she contrasts this enduring spirit with the harsh reality of global upheaval.
Ugo Milano from Italy sets his project in Göttingen, Germany and searches for a reality that is no longer there. In his project Under Which Tree Did Goethe Sleep he attempts to capture the history of the place. His images are a way to make the invisible visible, by using his camera to reveal the layers of the past that still linger within the modern landscape.
While the previous group of artists deals with where we are, the second group - Gaocanyue Zhu, Ricardo Tokugawa, Yi Hsuan Lai, and Peter Brandt - deals with how we are put together (or pulled apart). They construct, deconstruct and reconstruct how we build our identities, our histories and our worlds.
The title Cleave of South African Peter Brandt’s project is a contronym - it means both to split or separate and to stick to. In his sharp black and white images, he fragments and reassembles memories to create healing narratives.
For his series Utaki Japanese-Brazilian photographer Ricardo Tokugawa uses the camera to rebuild a bridge between his present self and his ancestral past. By examining tradition as something “invented”, he breaks down the boundaries of the domestic space and shapes a new reality through his own “rites of passage” transforming personal memory into a universal experience.
Meanwhile, Taiwanese Yi Hsuan Lai dissects the mundane in her work Ongoing Narratives. Her raw, unpolished, yet fresh still lifes of sculptural collages - built from found objects and disposable materials - and self-portraits dismantle traditional storytelling forcing a confrontation between the human body and the physical object.
In The South is Infinite yet Finite Gaocanyue Zhu from China takes the established authority of institutions—museums and laboratories—and questions their claim to absolute truth. By juxtaposing documentary images with their own composed images they offer a new layer of meaning that is personal and intuitive rather than academic.
Like Ugo Milano, American Danielle Ezzo and Ema Lančaričová from Slovakia use photography to materialize what is otherwise hidden from view: psychic visions and utopian ghosts. Ezzo gives physical form to these internal visions, helping them survive by translating them into images. Her ongoing project, Psychic Telephone, is a collaboration with author Marin Sardy; their work results from a continuous exchange, using Sardy’s interviews with psychics as the foundation for their project. Regular readers of see-zeen will know our interest in collaborative practices, which is why their work immediately caught our attention.
Lančaričová reimagines the life of a ruin by giving it a new, conceptual future. In Photopia she looks to the unfulfilled dreams trapped within the concrete ruins of the Eastern Bloc. Using Polaroid film, she refines these industrial remnants into a utopia - a non-place existing outside of the historical flow. For both artists, the photograph doesn’t serve as a document, but as a reinterpretation that allows the invisible to survive.
As the world breaks into pieces we hope that art can keep us together and that we can all find new inspiration in the same way that collage does, by taking pieces, rearranging them and making something new and better.
