INSTITUTE BLOG

INTERVIEW: Rob Hornstra talks to Spotlight about The Sochi Project

Rob Hornstra talks to spotlight about winning the World Press Photo, The Sochi Project and about working in the Caucus. 

 

EVENT: Simon Norfolk, Exhibition 'The New York Times Magazine Photographs' at Foam Gallery, Amsterdam

Simon Norfolk's work is on show at Foam in Amsterdam until 30th May 2012 as part of 'The New York Times Magazine Photographs' exhibition, co-curated by Kathy Ryan, longtime Photo Editor of the Magazine, and Lesley A. Martin, Publisher of Aperture Books.

© Simon Norfolk/INSTITUTE 

The Aperture-produced exhibition is comprised of eleven individual modules, each of which focuses on a notable project or series of projects that have been presented in the pages of the Magazine. The featured projects mirror the Magazine's eclecticism, presenting seminal examples of reportage, portraiture, as well as fine art photography which reveal the Magazine's unique position as a venue for visual storytelling and a unique forum for the cross-pollination of photographic genres.

The exhibition includes work by 37 photographers, including: Lilian Bassman, Chuck Close, Philip Lorca diCorcia, Gregory Crewdson, Thomas Demand,  Rineke Dijkstra, Mitch Epstein, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Jeff Koons, Annie Leibovitz, Ryan McGinley, Hellen van Meene, Jeff Mermelstein, Simon Norfolk, Paolo Pellegrin, Gilles Peress, Sebastiao Salgado,  Andres Serrano and Malick Sidibe.

The book, The New York Times Magazine Photographs published by Aperture will appear alongside the exhibition.

Event: Zed Nelson's 'Love Me' exhibition opens at Durham Art Gallery

'Love Me' will be exhibited at Impressions Gallery from 5 May to 24 June 2012. 

In LOVE ME, Zed Nelson reflects on the cultural and commercial forces that drive a global obsession with youth and beauty.

Over a period of five years Zed Nelson visited eighteen countries across five continents, photographing cosmetic surgeons, beauty queens and bodybuilders alongside everyday teenagers, housewives and businessmen. In this extensive cross-cultural investigation, we see an annual prison beauty contest in a South American penitentiary, Iranians queuing for nose jobs in Tehran and female staff at a Russian nuclear agency competing for the title of‘Miss Atom’.

The project explores a new form of globalisation, where an increasingly narrow Western beauty ideal is being exported around the world like a crude universal brand. Whilst Nelson's subjects appear willing participants in an omnipresent culture of bodily improvement, they might equally be considered hapless victims - at the mercy of larger social forces and locked into an insatiable craving for approval. As the subject’s frailties and pretensions are exposed, so too are we the viewer: our motives for looking, for inspecting, along with uncomfortable reminders of our own vanities and insecurities. 

Event: Zed Nelson and Paolo Woods Exhibitions to open at Bristol Festival of Photography

Zed Nelson's 'Hackney - A Tale of Two Cities' and Paolo Wood's 'Radio Days' to be exhibited for the first time at the new Philadelphia Street Gallery, the two exhibitions will run consecutively from 3-31st May 2012 as part of the Bristol Festival of Photography. 

© Zed Nelson/INSTITUTE

© Paolo Woods/INSTITUTE

EVENT: Rob Hornstra's "Empty Land, Promised Land, Forbidden Land" exhibition extended until 21st April 2012 at Foto8, London

The Sochi Project: Empty Land, Promised Land, Forbidden Land Photographs by Rob Hornstra and text by Arnold van Bruggen 15 March – 21 April 2012

FOTO8, 1-5 Honduras Street, London EC1Y 0TH Tel: 020 7253 8801 Email: info@foto8.com www.foto8.com

INSTITUTE @ World Press Photo

INSTITUTE artists and World Press Photo winners Simon Norfolk, Paolo Woods, Rob Hornstra and Guillaume Herbaut together with Executive Director Matt Shonfeld will be attending the Awards Days next weekend in Amsterdam.

http://www.worldpressphoto.org/event/awards-days

 

LECTURE (Free): Lauren Greenfield at New York Film Academy/School of Photography

On Monday, April 9th @ 7:30pm, Lauren will give an Artist Lecture at Warner Brothers, Screening Room 5 (Free).  Click image below to get your free tickets.  Sponsored by Canon USA.

Twitter: @NYFA
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BOOK SIGNING: Richard Mosse at Aperture Gallery, Monday, March 5th 6:30 pm

Aperture Gallery
547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor
New York, New York
(212) 505-5555

Join Aperture, The Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, and Jack Shainman Gallery for a special Armory-week artist-talk and book signing with INSTITUTE Artist Richard Mosse, upon the release of the new book Infra. Infra offers a stunning and radical rethinking of how to depict a complex and intractable conflict like the ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a nation bordering on, and deeply intertwined, with Rwanda's difficult recent history. Mosse photographs both the rich topography, inscribed with traces of conflicting interests, as well as rebel groups with constantly shifting allegiances at war with the Congelese National Army, itself a patchwork of recently integrated warlords and their militias.

This is Mosse's first book, co-published by Aperture and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The series is shot on Aerochrome—a discontinued false-color reversal large-format infrared film (sometimes as large as 12-by-20 inches), originally produced for the U.S. military for the purposes of surveillance. As a result of the film's sensitivity to the color green in particular, the thatched-roof huts and young men posturing in makeshift uniforms, are set against an incongruous bed of violently pink foliage and fuchsia-tinged rolling hills. The work documents the rebel factions and the Congolese national army with startlingly surreal results.

These improbably colored images underline the growing tension between art, fiction, and traditional photojournalism as a way of portraying and communicating the impact of war. When decades worth of photojournalism has inured us to images of teenagers wielding rocket-propelled grenades, the complexity of a situation may best be communicated, as Mosse states, "through shocks to the imagination," using photography's unique ability "to make visible what cannot be perceived." The images may not offer a solution to the conflict depicted, but they do make it much more difficult to turn away. Infra initiates a dialogue with photography that begins as an intoxicating meditation on a broken genre, and ends as a haunting elegy for a vividly beautiful land touched by unspeakable tragedy.

The feature: INFRA // Richard Mosse

EVENT: Rob Hornstra's "Empty Land, Promised Land, Forbidden Land" at Foto8, London

The Sochi Project: Empty Land, Promised Land, Forbidden Land Photographs by Rob Hornstra and text by Arnold van Bruggen 15 March – 7 April 2012

Foto8 announces an exhibition of photography by INSTITUTE artist Rob Hornsta, bringing his work from The Sochi Project to a London audience for the first time.

We knew almost nothing about Abkhazia when we visited for the first time in 2006. During our virtual travels through the country across maps on the internet, we discovered a fascinating landscape of mountains and rivers, with the majority of the towns spread out along the Black Sea. We read about snowy mountains of dizzying height that rise straight out of the sea, about endless beaches and lush gardens full of palms, tea bushes and citrus trees. We put the place names Sukhumi and Gagra in our mouths and savoured them like exotic morsels.

This coastal strip on the Black Sea was once the Riviera of the Soviet Union. Stalin had two dachas there. His successor, Khrushchev, swam in Pitsunda’s warm waters when the Communist Party in Moscow ousted him to make way for the party mastodon Brezhnev. In the literature and Soviet guidebooks, Abkhazia sounds like a dream, a subtropical oasis on the Black Sea, a promised land.

The more we read about it, the more it enticed us, like a fairy tale; but a fairy tale tinged with black.
On the flip side are the ruins, the pot-holed roads along which only the overgrown, concrete stairs of houses still stand, the rusted gates and car wrecks, the twisted remains of the horrific civil war that erupted here in the early ’90s. It reminded us of areas such as Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Kosovo, all small, violent and unviable provinces of artificially created countries. Abkhazia had been destroyed by civil war and forced into isolation, but had kept itself going for 15 years despite an international boycott and a tourism-based economy in a region without tourists.

The Abkhazians live in devastation and poverty. During the war they deported 200,000 Georgians and in so doing went from being a vacation paradise to a totally isolated country. The 200,000 refugees live in equally impoverished conditions and are filled with nostalgia for their lost paradise. This cynical parallel was the reason for us to make four trips to Abkhazia and to record this obscure and painful conflict.

Empty land, Promised land, Forbidden land is not an encyclopaedic history or analysis of the conflict or the geopolitics in the region. Rather, it is an ode to the Caucasus and its proud inhabitants. Empty land, Promised land, Forbidden land is part of The Sochi Project, started by Rob Hornstra and Arnoldvan Burggen in 2009. Over the course of five years, their aim is to map out the extensive region around the Russian resort of Sochi, where the Olympic Winter Games will be held in 2014. The Games are being organised in Russia’s most unstable region, the Caucasus. Under the slogan ‘slow journalism’, Hornstra and van Bruggen request donations from the public to crowd fund the project, whose scale and length is financially unviable for the mass media. www.thesochiproject.org 

FOTO8, 1-5 Honduras Street, London EC1Y 0TH Tel: 020 7253 8801 Email: info@foto8.com www.foto8.com

EVENT: Jodi Bieber at the opening of World Press Photo in South Africa