Sunday, 1 September 2013

Natasha Lesueur and Bruno Pelassi



I remember listening to Natasha Lesueur's lecture in France when she was talking about this project she did with her male friend where they would go shopping for women shoes in car boot sales and work on them in order to fit the man's feet. 

Newsha Tavakolian - "Listen"

The Project Listen focuses on women singers who are not allowed to perform solo or produce their own CDs due to Islamic regulations in effect since 1979 revolution. The photos are taken of the professional women singers performing in their mind in front of a large audience where in reality this was taking place in a small private studio in downtown Teheran. Subsequently, in my mind, I made a dream over CD for each of the woman which was my own interpretation of the society iI live in and experience, however,the CD cases will for now remain empty.

"For me a woamn's voice represents a power that if you silence it, imbalances society and makes everything deform. The porject Listen echoes the voices of these silenced women. I let Iranian women singers perform through my camera while the world has never heard them."









Sophia Wallace - Cliteracy












Sunday, 21 July 2013

Lavatory Self-Portraits In The Flemish Style - Nina Katchadourian - 2011











Nina Katchadourian travels a lot. She’s clocked up 102 flights since March 2010, mostly for exhibitions, projects, teaching and lectures. She could, as many of us do, drink gin and tonic, watch five films back to back and sleep. But Katchadourian makes better use of her time. Using her camera phone, she takes photographs of amusing still-lifes improvised from the objects around her. The series, Seat Assignment, includes more than a dozen sub-projects: in Provisional Shelters, Katchadourian builds edifices from crackers; in Buckleheads, she snaps portraits of her neighbours reflected in her seatbelt buckle; and in Sweater Gorillas, she has created abstract, simian faces from the folds of a black sweater. They’re the sort of daft things a bored teenager might come up with, but Katchadourian’s gonzo-style shots and the repetitive, taxonomical nature of each study lend her otherwise slightly silly photographs a certain thoughtfulness.Lavatory Self-Portraits In The Flemish Style is her most creative vignette. On a flight from San Francisco to Auckland, she put a paper toilet seat cover on her head and took a picture in the mirror. Well, who wouldn’t?
The image, she realised, evoked 15th-century Flemish portraiture. So she experimented: a neck pillow and napkins serve as a medieval wimple; and an eye mask, napkins and a paper cup echo Vermeer’s Girl With A Pearl Earring. Katchadourian often strung up her scarf as a background, and insists she didn’t hold up the queue for the toilet, making her forays mostly when other passengers were asleep.
Aspects of Seat Assignment were first exhibited in February 2011 in Dunedin, New Zealand. In what is probably an artistic first, the bulk of the work was created on the flight from New York. Katchadourian is currently on show at the Turner Contemporary in Margate, and may well inspire visitors to get creative on their summer holiday flights this year.
Photograph: Nina Katchadourian/Catharine Clark Gallery