Opening - PARALLEL Exhibition / Rarely Pure, Never Simple
PARALLEL Exhibition / Rarely Pure, Never Simple
UGM Studio, Trg Leona Štuklja 2
exhibition opening: Friday, 18 May 2018, 19:00
guided tour: Friday, 18 May 2018, 18:00 (in english)
artists: Joséphine Desmenez (FR), Philipp Meuser (GER), Livia Sperandio (IT), Nita Vera (FI)
curator: Maria Faarinen (FI)
The exhibition Rarely Pure, Never Simple exhibition features four young fine art photographers who took part in the international exchange and mentorship programme PARALLEL - European Photo Based Platform during its first phase. All the works in the exhibition are completely new, created in 2018.
PARALLEL is a platform bringing together European cultural institutions working in the field of photography with an aim to provide training, visibility and promotion to the next generation of European photographers and curators. It connects photo festivals and independent spaces with museums, galleries and art schools to promote a more fluid links among them. The platform consists of 18 high-level players from 16 countries, ensuring a geographical spread from Finland to Portugal.
In the next four years members of the platform will work together to provide an exhibition platform for young European photographers, increase professional skills of emerging creators and develop new links between emerging creators and art institutions. This will include activities such as tutoring of emerging artists and curators, peer learning, curatorship, new productions of art works, open calls, exhibitions at museums/festivals, networking events, publications and more.
One of the main events of the first PARALLEL year 2017/18 is the photography exhibition of young emerging artists, which we will host in UGM Studio between 18 May and 16 June.
When it comes to values, politics or religion, most of us are willing to accept that people's outlooks and world views are different. But what about the everyday things: places, objects, people, even our own emotions and memories? Are they not just as open to interpretation? Are they similarly devoid of any fixed, permanent core? In the light of everyday reason, we believe we know what is true. It makes everyday life uncomplicated and smooth. Therefore, rejecting certain truths can feel scary. However, an inquisitive mind can find that a wider horizon of possibilities is revealed from behind the ready answers. Because if nothing is certain, everything might still be possible.
Joséphine Desmenez (born 1993, France) has photographed portraits in a way that departs from tradition and particularly the conventions of social media. She has hunted for moments of imperfection and loss of control to reveal the vulnerability of the models.
Philipp Meuser (born 1986, Germany) sieves through the sediment of history and mythology in one of the most popular tourist destinations in Germany. The island today known as Rügen has an exciting history, but what is the meaning of the past in a geographical place? Are there traces from the past other than the sediment investigated by archaeologists? And if the place has been mythical in the past, can there still be some true magic?
Livia Sperandio (born 1991, Italy) explores ways of perception via photography. What is the relation between an everyday object and a photograph of it? An ordinary object that is in everyday use can be so banal it becomes almost invisible. Can that same object in a photograph be something else, something we observe or sense differently?
Nita Vera (born 1986, Finland) has written autofictional love stories, and to create a textual basis, has worked in cooperation with psychotherapists and theatre-makers. In an intense working process, she has dived deep into her experiences from psychological and physical perspectives. The project highlights memories and histories as a story, many times told and always a construction. In the context of Nita Vera’s project, the name of the exhibition could easily refer to love and relationships. The name could just as easily denote photography. Both are “rarely pure, never simple”. However, primarily, the name is a reference to Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), and the original quotation in full is: The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
More about the exhibition
PARALLEL is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
KINDLY INVITED!
