On the Verge‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎FUTURES talents ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

On the Verge

Traveling exhibition from the FUTURES platform


On the Verge features the newly published texts by: Aaron Schuman, Alessia Glaviano, Brad Zellar, Cat Lachowskyj, Charles Baudelaire, David Campany, Elissa Marder, Salvatore Vitale, Tim Carpenter.
And the images by: Alice Pallot, Cian Burke, Dániel Szalai, Julia Klewaniec, Mark Duffy, Pauline Hisbacq, Ugo Woatzi.

The publication is a collaboration between FUTURES and Void.

Purchase "On the Verge"

As human and non-human bodies, we share the verge as an ecosystem community, believing that we live in exceptional and challenging times and spaces: we are on the final verge. But we are also on the verge as individuals, urging to transform our existential or artistic starting point to an immortal impact, to reconnect art with collective issues: the verge of developing your sexuality, having a nervous breakdown, leaving the parents’ home, starting school, graduating, writing your will, giving birth, breaking up, making something stupid, or something big, having an accident, doing great art, doing shitty art, having an epiphany, meeting someone new, getting in trouble, supporting a cause, starting a hobby, getting hyper, getting depressed, facing your limitations, or overcoming them. Accomplishing an important project, or starting a new one. Writing history, being forgotten. Big things, small things.

© Francesco Martello

As part of the European platform FUTURES Photography, the travel exhibition ‘On the Verge’ has moved to the festival center. Such as Ugo Woatzi’s “CHAMELEON” project in our venue Frame.

© Francesco Martello

The 7 Futures talents are: Cian Burke, Mark Duffy, Pauline Hisbacq, Julia Klewaniec, Alice Pallot, Daniel Szalai and Ugo Woatzi. Across seven individual projects with different processes or aesthetics, they present us their version of being On the Verge. They collectively explore different aspects of the theme through identity, ecology, our relation with the environment, interactions and changes humans can either suffer or decide. Their work invites us to redefine our limits and values and encourages us to commit in favour of what we support and find necessary.

On the right, this is the outdoor installation with the artist Alice Pallot’s “Suillus, looking at the sun with closed eyelids” work.

 

The exhibition is curated by Maja Dyrehauge Gregersen (Copenhagen Photo Festival), Giangavino Pazzola (CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia) and Marta Szymańska (FotoFestiwal).

See more about the exhibition in Turin

Cian Burke – I fear that the magic has left this place, 2020

Here you can see the structure from Cian Burke’s project “I fear that the magic has left this place” at the festival Center, in June.

Cian Burke is an artist originally from Ireland, now based in Sweden. Working primarily with photography, installation and text, his work sits at the intersection of documentary and the mannerisms of staged photography — where the notion of truth is up for negotiation.

Inspired by the story of Karl-Göran Persson who, having received a booklet titled Om Kriget Kommer (“If War Comes”) distributed by the Swedish government in 1961, transformed his small farmhouse into a giant concrete bunker that could protect his entire community, Cian Burke’s “I fear that the magic has left this place” (2020) creates a narrative in which real events and internalised hopes and fears are juxtaposed with fictional ideas and spaces.

Today this house stands as an embodiment of a reaction to such perceived threats, and its status as a ruined and fragmented construction allows us a connection to that history. An exploration of these past references can also encourage connections to be made with our present condition, naturally leading to a sense of concern about the future. In our current climate, the idea of the future seems as something evermore precarious and out of our hands.

See the artist’s website here

Mark Duffy – BREXIT IS YOUR FAULT, 2022

One of our three outdoor installations : the tunnel from Mark Duffy’s project “Brexit is your fault” at the Festival Center.

Mark Duffy used to work as a photographer for the Houses of Parliament during the Brexit referendum discussions. His artworks explore issues of politics, power and media in the public sphere.

Mark Duffy was working in UK parliament at a time of unprecedented political upheaval- Brexit. He immediately felt guilty; for having not challenged more people of opposing views and for being even a tiny part of the institution facilitating this act of political vandalism. And he instantly became obsessed, to an unhealthy degree. Brexit was everywhere and nowhere at the same time, dominating conversations, the news on tv, print and online 24 hours a day and yet it was invisible- with seemingly no tangible evidence manifested in British people day to day reality. In order to understand Brexit, Duffy set out to photograph it but struggled with the limitations of photography to represent an abstract political concept. The result of this struggle was as multi-strand body of work collectively titled “BREXIT IS YOUR FAULT”. In his attempts to understand and manifest Brexit he amassed an archive of its ephemera (“The Brexit Archive”), re-appropriated and manipulated official House of Commons press images (“Creative Commons”), photographed the mutilated genitals of the Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum (“The Lost Marbles”), secretly crawled around the Palace of Westminster on his hand and knees photographing the deterioration of its ornate carpets (“On Pugin”), turned his house into an exhibition space and had it raided by the police as a result (“In The Wake Of Brexit”).

See the artist’s website here

Pauline Hisbacq – Songs for women and birds, 2020

Pauline Hisbacq’s project “Songs for women and birds” in our venue Frame at the Festival Center.

Hisbacq’s poetic work, whether using her own images or in the manipulation of archival photographs, examines questions of youth, desire, rites of passage and resistance. She looks for feelings in forms and figures, exploring links between the intimate and the political.

The project “Songs for women and birds” is a set of collages elaborated from the archive images of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (1981-2000). Here, ordinary women fought against the installation of nuclear missiles by the United States, right here in England, which contributed to maintaining the terror of the Cold War. They used to sing in resistance to the police, and more generally to the world of domination, for the preservation of future generations, the hope of peace, the protection of humanity, and the respect of nature.

The collages focus on the way in which women inscribe their bodies in a gesture of struggle at the antipodes of the current manifestations. The first stake to communicate their revolt was to be always peaceful, even in front of the police repression. It was thus necessary to weld the bodies, in the tenderness, to make front vis-a-vis the domination which they denounced and which attacked them.

See the artist’s website here

Julia Klewaniec – Silent Racism, 2022

Julia Klewaniec’s project “Silent Racism” has also set up video and audio installations available to the public.

Julia Klewaniec is a photographer and cultural animator. Currently a chief Creative Officer of Picture Doc Foundation – space for dialogue dedicated to young artists in Poland. As a photographer she deals with topics related to society, diversity and exclusion.

With “Silent Racism” (2022), Julia Klewaniec highlights the ways in which racism is normalised in today’s Polish society – and, by extension, in world society – through the use of spoken language. The artist focuses on the change in the meaning of words that were previously considered disparaging (e.g. ‘Murzyn’, a derogatory term for a black person) and are now tolerated and becoming commonplace. Interviewing black people born or resident in Poland, the artist analyses how the political and media discourse of the last 30 years has influenced the drifts and impoverishment of language, as well as the ways in which racist and derogatory expressions have become part of common speech.

See the artist’s website here

Alice Pallot – Suillus, looking at the sun with closed eyelids, 2020

Alice Pallot’s project “Suillus, looking at the sun with closed eyelids” also used an outdoor installation.

Alice Pallot is fascinated by natural phenomena, metamorphoses and silent realities. Her work questions and bears witness to the impact that human beings have today on their environment but also aspires to delicately capture the air of time. She creates universes with hybrid themes through sensitive documentaries. These visual encounters, stemming from ecological questions that emerge as signals in the young artist’s active social life, allow her to use photography to highlight ambiguities of a new and future era.

In search of freedom, during covid in 2020, Alice Pallot and her friends took a day-trip to Lommel (Belgium) and explored today’s Sahara nature reserve, where the vegetation disappeared due to the activities of a former zinc factory. To prevent the desertification of the area, a coniferous forest was planted. On this soil, a resistant fungus – Suillus Bovinus – grew, and ended up protecting the trees and the new vegetation from the toxicity of the surrounding environment. In “Suillus, looking at the sun with closed eyelids” (2020), the artist testifies to humanity its impact on the environment, highlighting the contrast between the Sahara’s idyllic appearance and its actual toxicity. This series is made without any retouches but Alice Pallot used things she found in the Lommelse Sahara to create a filter and make us look at the world through pollution.

See the artist’s website here

Daniel Szalai – Unleash Your Herd’s Potential, 2019 – Ongoing

Here you can see Daniel Szalai’s project “Unleash your herd’s potential” with his whites salt licks.

Daniel Szalai’s projects investigate peculiar manifestations of human-animal relationships and reflect on societal, political and economic anomalies. Szalai mixes different media in his artistic practice and also works with spatial installations.

Considering precision dairy farming, the work reflects on surveillance, exploitation and our relationship with nature. Utilising computer vision, AI and robotics, today’s automated farm functions as a digital panopticon in which cows are subject to continuous monitoring. Quantifying all aspects of their life, technology allows treating each individual as a mere dataset. This can be seen as surveillance capitalism applied to animals, and a means of consolidating the distance between humans and animals by virtualization and gamification. Szalai addresses these issues by rendering cows using photogrammetry. This 3D-scanning technique represents its subjects as a cloud of information and gives the work a ‘sci-fi bucolic’ character in which the datafied existence of animals belongs to a technological landscape perceived through digital means. Besides, the work comprises a collection of salt licks that provide a counterpoint by bringing in materiality and the agency of the cows.

See the artist’s website here

Ugo Woatzi – CHAMELEON, 2018 – Ongoing

In addition to his photos, Ugo Woatzi used in his project “CHAMELEONtextiles on which his work was also printed.

Ugo Woatzi’s photographs reference real and imagined spaces caught between the worlds of freedom and constraint. He reveals and yet conceals, as a chameleon changes colour to blend in and survive. Ugo’s collaborative process is a reflection of the desires and struggles of his community.

Ugo Woatzi offers an autobiographical project reflecting on the LGBTQI+ issue and the defence of gender rights. “Chameleon” (2018 – ongoing) is a series of staged photographs that, by showing various portraits of possible masculinities, highlights how the main representations of gender identities are actually socio-culturally constructed expressions. Using masks, textiles and accessories, and reassembling them with new colours and shapes, Woatzi questions the conventional patterns of the visual narrative of masculinity and heterosexuality. At the same time, the drapes hanging on the wall form a personal queer imaginary space within which the artist invites visitors to shamelessly express their love, hopes and fears.

See the artist’s website here

 

The Meet-up programme and the travel exhibition “On the verge” were generously funded by FUTURES and co-funded by Knud Højgaards Fond and Wistifonden specifically for the outdoors installations.