Lundi 20 Octobre 2014 11:49:17 par actuphoto dans Expositions

In 2001 Jules Wright commissioned Elina Brotherus to make her first solo show in the UK, Spring (2001). 28 year old Elina was shortlisted for the then Citi Bank Prize (now the Deutsche Börse) and at that time she was the youngest ever nominee for this prestigious award. Since then Elina has shown on a number of memorable occasions at the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station and subsequently at the Wapping Project Bankside. Her work was recently seen at the Photographers’ Gallery in a moving series about her own experience with IVF.


Brotherus is well-known for the unflinching documentation of her own life, and 12 ans après represents a most intimate body of work. The series brings together her Suite françaises – which the artist made on moving to Chalon-sur-Saône in France for a residency at the age of 27 and which famously records, in post- it notes, her attempts to learn French – with a set of photographs taken on re-visiting the same places twelve years later. “I wanted to see how it would affect me to be in that same place again, after the passage of all those years,” says Brotherus. “I needed to confront myself with my younger self, at the very beginning of her career. I wanted to look into where I am now…what has happened since those early years full of expectations…. When you do not understand the language spoken around you, you live in a strange state of instability,” she explains. “This work (Suite françaises) is an effort to learn a new language, to get acquainted with a new country and a new culture.” The post-it notes appear again 12 years later, though Brotherus had learned the language, and they now contain whole stories, in some cases sad, disturbing and reflective.
In this series and throughout Brotherus’ work, we see self-portraits that examine the relationship between the individual, time and space. The emotional, autobiographical quality of the work conflates the subjective and the universal, so that we see how both ourselves, and the world around us are changing over time. The moments that make up 12 ans après juxtapose past and present selves, capturing the memory of Brotherus’ sense of self at two
distinctive times in her life, paradoxically managing to immortalise the notion of transience and change. “Creating images shakes me up,” she says, “and when life is 'shaky', I get the urge to take photographs.”
12 ans après consists of pigment ink prints ranging from 50 x 33cm to 90 x 120cm, both from film and digitaoriginals. The series has been edited into an exquisite limited edition portfolio of 35 images, size 42 x 52cm. This portfolio – published by Musée Nicéphore Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône, France – includes many sold-out images from the original 1999 series Suites françaises.