CIRCULATION(S)

Only in its second year, CIRCULATION(S) is a festival dedicated to emerging European photography, held in the rather idyllic setting of the Jardins de Bagatelle in Paris. On opening day, a throng of photography professionals and amateurs alike milled around the two lovely buildings, taking notes and munching Haribo sweets, which was all very jolly. However, what remains from this festival is not just a celebration of contemporary photography (and more on this later), but a true investment in the photo community, with a programme of events spanning the duration of the event, from 25 February until 25 March: free portfolio reviews for young photographers (held on 10 and 11 March), a sale of the works in the exhibition, a game sponsored by Tamron to win some kit, and many other fun and interactive set-ups… In short, even though this festival is a recent addition to the ever-growing festival scene, it’s a dynamic and thoroughly professional one, with some particularly accomplished work on show, selected by various photography organisations such as Fetart (the non-profit set up by Marion Hislen, initiator of the festival itself), SFR Jeunes Talents, curators and special guests.

So, with all this background information securely in place, back to the highlights of my Parisian Haribo-sweetened flânerie… I discovered the work of Alexandra Serrano with great pleasure – a Franco-Mexican artist whose series “Between Finger and Thumb” is a photographic reconstruction of the artist’s most vivid memories. Delicately poised between autobiography and dream-work, the images staged in the artist’s growing-up home are both intimate and immediate, cleanly finished, with fragmented detailed shots of eggshells and bite marks somewhat reminiscent of the work of Rinko Kawauchi interspersed with anodyne home scenes seen through a child-like prism.

Steeped in a more documentary tradition, the work of German photographer Lia Darjes bears a similar attention to detail and lighting. In her project “Converting”, she investigates Muslim converts in Germany: why do German people convert to Islam? How is Islam represented in the West? The series is composed of portraits, still lives, and location scenes, all infused with a painterly light that, strangely, harks back to the Great Masters’ use of holy light in sacred paintings. Calmly, gently, the images draw us in to invite us to ponder the role of religion in Western society.

Equally beguiling, Kurt Tong‘s project, “In Case it Rains in Heaven” is a photographic index of the paper objects burnt by the Chinese at the tombs of their deceased relatives, in order to “send” them the objects they will need in the afterlife: from an umbrella to a pair of servants, from a McDonald’s meal to a scuba-diving kit, everything that can be found in real life is replicated in paper for the afterlife. Tong’s work, as always, manages to bridge the real and the poetic with conceptual elegance.

Finally, young British photographer Matt Wilson showed a series of small images from his travels in the US. Received wisdom might have inclined the artist to display these images as large as possible, but the small format used here gave these desolate yet enchanting vistas a personal and intimate feel rarely seen in this kind of landscape work. In fact it’s both difficult and brave to make American landscape work these days, with artists from Ansel Adams to Joel Sternfeld, and from Edward Weston to Stephen Shore, casting a strong shadow that informs our reading of the images. A horse standing by a broken-down barn, a cigarette lit in twilight flare, overexposed canyons: the scenes are unmistakably American, playing with the trope of the Far West’s deserted melancholy. Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy comes to mind, violence and tenderness, a premature wisdom and truthfulness, erupting to the surface of these images as they do in McCarthy’s words: “The truth is what happened. It aint what come out of somebody’s mouth.”

And upon these wise words, so my visit concludes, with only too little time and space to mention some of the other great work on show, notably, by: David De Beyter, Michel Bousquet, Tony Kristensson, Augustin Rebetez, and Gilles Roudiere. I leave you to discover them in your own time!

Details of the festival are here: http://www.festival-circulations.com/

This article was originally published in Notes from the Undergroud.

The Goddess of Small Things

Rinko Kawauchi in conversation at the Japan Art Foundation

Taking pictures every day for years, Rinko Kawauchi isn’t an artist who sets out with the idea of making work, she “just takes pictures”. As she says, what she’s trying to to do with her books is to put together snapshots of daily life to show her world view. And her world view is what she is famous for: beautiful, delicate, photographs that deal straight on with the real yet esoteric concerns of life and death. The real and the esoteric, the quotidian and the poetic, the concrete and the imagined: these dualities inform Rinko Kawauchi’s practice and make it a compelling, mysterious, and mystical body of work.

Her process is as intriguing as her practice. One of her books, Cui Cui, which took thirteen years to complete, is composed of photographs of her family. She continues the work, and orders it in order to show the universal reflected in her own family. This duality is omnipresent in her work: she strives to capture that which is abstract in the daily act. In her thorough editing process, she chooses single images that make it into her books, out of thousands, in order to create a carefully (re-)constructed world, which in turn helps her become more aware of the world she lives in: for her, this piecing together and composing of a world is a form of meditation.

Murmuration, a new piece, recently commissioned by PhotoWorks for the Brighton Biennial, is, for the first part, a study of the starlings that flock, dip, and dive as a group (a murmuration of starlings) above the Brighton shore. Although the Brighton starlings are often photographed by tourists and students alike, and have come to represent a Brighton cliché, Kawauchi’s work, in its melancholy, dusky, patience, manages to make the images singular, and very recognisably hers. Describing the work, she mentions that only the starlings know why they behave like this, and draws a parallel to human beings: why do we behave in the way we do? Why do starlings exist, and why do we exist?

The liminality of the shore seems a good place for Kawauchi’s practice. She says she often takes a nap in the afternoon during which she has vivid dreams, flashbacks or memories that come to her so vividly that it is an uncomfortable experience. On the border between wakefulness and sleep, these incidents become a motivating factor in her work. She questions why we forget some things, and why we remember others.

Kawauchi’s description of her drive to make work parallels the drive circling the Lacanian objet petit a: the making of the work becomes more important and life-sustaining than discovering the true nature of its object. Indeed she tells of how she intuits the moment to take a photograph, and that when she is immersed in her work, it is a deep and complete experience which leaves her exhausted. Photographing the small things that make up the daily business of life and death, Kawauchi’s work demands us to participate with her in her dream-work, in order to remember the things that really matter.

All images © Rinko Kawauchi.