Vendredi 18 Décembre 2015 12:15:07 par Alix Chambaud dans Expositions

We see the world in images. Our view of the world is shaped by them. Over the course of the past ten years, the exhibition series WORLD IMAGES, showcasing contemporary international photography, has been providing opportunities to look at things and people differently and, in doing so, perhaps, to see oneself differently as well. The focus of WORLD IMAGES 6 is on the individual: on how we find direction, how we are manipulated, how we are left to our own devices, how we move within the community, how we perceive society and the self.

© Lina Scheynius / Courtesy of Christophe Guye Galerie, Zurich/Switzerland

The exhibition WORLD IMAGES 6 begins with young Swedish photographer Lina Scheynius turning the camera on herself. She is her own world. Here, photography is both a quest for identity and a proof of existence. The innermost and outermost of her own body is shared with the world. The exhibition then leaps to Africa: what image do we have of everyday life in Africa? Young Swiss photographer Flurina Rothenberger, who grew up in Africa, brings us a book brimful of images showing the talent of a continent in dealing with contrasts.

© Lina Scheynius / Courtesy of Christophe Guye Galerie, Zurich/Switzerland
 

The present becomes the theme in the dual images by Paul Graham: is there even such a thing as the present? This British photographer juxtaposes two images of New York street life, between which there is a gap: representing the ephemeral? The present and happiness are both impossible to grasp: In the next room, as though from some previous decade and yet as though entirely in the present, we find the works by Annelies Štrba featuring her extended family. For the first time, the “grand and still young lady” of Swiss photography presents her works on paper. Memory, remembrance and a different kind of community are the themes addressed by the young Swiss artist Gilles Fontolliet. In Sowayma, a Jordanian village on the Dead Sea, he has created portraits of many people and has given them the pictures.

© Lina Scheynius / Courtesy of Christophe Guye Galerie, Zurich/Switzerland

Lukas Hoffmann, a Swiss photographer based in Berlin, strolls through suburbs and brownland spaces, where he finds unusual subjects for his images: bushes and fences, broken barriers and shadowy forms become both concrete and abstract visual elements. Dutch photographer Marike Schuurman, who also lives in Berlin, has devoted her attention to the advertising-free public spaces of São Paulo. Banished from the walls of buildings, advertisements are now carried on the backs of human sandwich boards proclaiming the potential to turn gold into cash. The monumental works of young Chinese photographer Shan Feiming address the sense of solitude in nature and among people, of love and the loss of love, hurt and care – an existential statement that is both personal and social.