ABENDLIED

Abendlied (Evening Song) is a personal exploration into the topics of family, memory, and loss. It examines how individual relationships in a family are shaped by the processes of growing up, aging, and eventually letting go. It reveals how this circle of life not only contributes to an ebb and flow of connection, but also to a feeling of separation within the family bond.

Although a personal inquiry, Abendlied reflects on the broader psychological components of identity, heritage and belonging. How are we shaped by the place we call home? What happens to us when we lose this foundational base? How does it continue to live inside of us, even if it ceases to exist in its physical form? Can it be replaced? These questions are an essential byproduct of our human condition, and even though individual answers may vary, we are undeniably united as humans by the fact that the place we come from leaves a fundamental imprint on us.

Response

INTERMÈDE AFGHAN

Donja Nasseri was born in Düsseldorf in 1990 and studies art at the Art Academy Düsseldorf in Gregor Schneider’s class. She is a daughter of Afghan/Egyptian parents, so she often analyses her experiences of culture clashes within the family. In her work she uses various media such as photography, video and audio and transforms them into installative presentations.

“Intermède Afghan” is based on a yearlong dispute with Donja nasseri's hidden afghan roots and her identity. It is very difficult to live in a hybrid world between different cultures. By an analog and experimental procedure, she developed the idea to take pictures of photographs from Afghanistan (which her father took in the 80s), without using editing programs, to transform the images in an unsharpness. She froze the photographs in ice to receive a threedimensional object. Her inward- and stranger feeling of Afghanistan, is exactly included in the “material” of ice.

The work consists of a variation of 13 photographs and a video. The Video is about the melting process and the interplay between two cultures. During the melting process, her father is interviewed in german. His answers are in afghan. The questions consist of easy questions like “who are you?” and also complex questions taken from Max Frischs Questionnaire, like “If you live together as husband and wife without having the same culture: do you feel excluded from your wife’s culture?”.

Interlude Afghanistan is a change between languages and cultures. A contact with a foreign culture, which is very close at the same time.

THE TANGLED WEB OF BELONGING

Nina is a fine artist working with still and moving images and text. She explores themes of belonging, multiple heritages and hybridity, often using a semiautobiographical approach.

The tangled web of belonging reflects on the complexity arising when a mixed heritage subject is included in an image of whiteness. This project brings together still lives, portraits and nature into a metaphorical mix that highlights the entanglement of narratives, myths, control and hybridity. It opens questions in relationship to ideas of contamination and how belonging is attained through the separation of things.

As an artist of mixed heritage, in this body of work Nina addresses the confrontation that arises when attempting to find belonging within a Western society, with a white mother. What does it mean that her mother and her create a contradiction when sharing the same frame? Partly what she is a reminder of is that nobody is unquestionably white. Her visible skin colour is a reminder of the mixing that took place, and continues to take place, since colonial times. It is a reminder that there is no origin, no certainty of belonging to rely on, and there never was. The ambivalence of hybridity creates a space for a critical discourse about which positions we choose and which positions are available to whom.

PASSENGERS

Cesar Dezfuli was born in 1991 in Madrid. Self-taught in photography and having learned his trade as a journalist, he now works as a freelance photojournalist, focusing on humanitarian crisis and international politics. Since 2015, his focus is on the migrant crisis in Europe, with a special attention on the Central Mediterranean migratory route.

On 1st August 2016, 118 people were rescued from a rubber boat drifting in the Mediterranean Sea. Another of the hundreds of boats that have been rescued from this migratory route over the past years. In 2016, when historical records were beaten, 181,436 migrants were rescued safe, while 4,576 lost their lives at sea.

In an attempt to put name and face to this reality, to humanize this tragedy, Cesar Dezfuli carry's out this work of documentation composed of 118 portraits of all the people who travelled on board the same boat, taken minutes after their rescue, once on board of the rescue vessel Iuventa. Their faces, their looks, the marks on their body, their clothes or the absence of it ... reflect the mood and physical state in which they are in a moment that has already marked their lives forever. Documenting it can serve to bring this migration reality closer to those who only observe it from a distance.

A political landscape actually refers to the current state of things, as well as how they are looking in the future. While these metaphors are never actually used, you could say that a recession is hard work, climbing up a hill, and then a boom is the exhilaration of riding down the other side in a go cart.
Photography that traces an event has recently come to be described as aftermath photography. It is considered a new phenomenon and, though having political subject matter at its heart reveals that the camera has long recorded the frightening after-effects of conflict and disaster.

Documentary and Narrative

Documentary photography usually refers to a  form of photography used to chronicle events or environments both significant and relevant to history and historical events as well as everyday life.
Narrative photography is the idea that photographs can be used to tell a story. Allen Feldman stated that "the event is not what happens. The event is that which can be narrated". In this case, the medium is photography.

https://fstoppers.com/originals/your-photography-political-166050

https://guernseyphotographyfestival.com/2018-festival/photographers/valeria-cherchi/gallery

https://guernseyphotographyfestival.com/2018-festival/photographers/andrea-magda/gallery

https://guernseyphotographyfestival.com/2018-festival/photographers/cesar-dezfuli/gallery