Photo London is a mixed bag this year. The special exhibitions and young gallery 'discovery section' are somewhat undercooked, but there's still plenty to like. For example:
Anastasia Samoylova: ‘Barge, Miami River’ 2021 at Peter Sillem, Frankfurt – stand E08
Possibly the most painterly straight image at Photo London sees
the Russian-born American artist find something of Rothko in this shot of a rusty
barge reflected in a Florida River – it’s from her series ‘Floridas’, looking at
the plural interpretations available of her home state as one of time capsules
and construction booms. Samoylova is shortlisted
for the Duetsche Borse prize for ‘Floodzone’, a related project using Florida’s
contradictions to convey anxiety at the effects of global warming.
Scarlett Hoof Graafland: ‘Hunters Point’ 2005 at Flowers Gallery,
London / Hong Kong – A03
Also set in Florida, to very different effect… The imaginative
Dutch photographer describes this early work as dealing with ‘the ultimate
feeling that love can conquer everything, even a lake full of alligators.’ She
was planning to shoot herself with the New York performance artist Hunter Reynolds, but
he was not fit enough so she used a local artist instead, ‘but I kept the title
Hunters Point, somehow I think it fits.’ I had to edit this somewhat for Instagram, suppressing the shocking fact that the local artist had a penis.
Melanie Manchot: ‘Cornered Star (From Above)’ 2018-22 at Parafin, London – G08
Mikhael Subotzky: ‘Die Vaderland (0371)’, 2009 at Goodman
Gallery, Johannesburg / Cape Town / London – G18
Goodman provides a four project survey Subotzky’s work,
calling it ‘at once highly introspective and revelatory of the systemic injustices
wrought by South Africa’s colonialist legacy’. This is from the same time as ‘Ponte
City’, the 2015 Duetsche Prize winning collaboration with Patrick Waterhouse that
documented Johannesburg’s most famous tower block, but taken in a different
building, once a nationalist headquarters but having been abandoned once apartheid
ended, was occupied by a group of Zimbabwean artists, hence the deliberate sculpture
among the accidentally sculptural effects.
Santeri Tuori: Water Lilies #20, 2020 at Persons Projects,
Berlin – G24
Tuori, a leading member of the ‘Helsinki School’, sails
through the Finnish archipelago each summer to find scenes of interest, then photograph
them repeatedly over the years and seasons. He then layers the images one on
top of one another, sometimes – as here – interleaving black-and-white and
colour negatives to encapsulate the passage of time while generating an otherworldly
result from the combination of worldly observations.
Marianne Marić: ‘Socle’, from the series 'Les Statues
Meurent Aussi', 2015 at Christophe Guye Galerie, Zurich - W3
Statues also die, according to the French artist’s series which
executes a playful back and forth between flesh and stone. Here the dismount
from a socle (plain low plinth) suggests a feminist perspective on exactly who
should be commemorated in public statues as well as teasing the viewer with the
question of whether those legs and arms can belong together.
Add some things I’ve written about before - Hannah Hughes at
Robert Marat (G19), various ‘outsider’ photographers at The Gallery of
Everything (E01), another chance to see Sally Mann’s Prix Pictet winning series
(F09) and artist-run Hi-Noon’s lively selection of editions (D05) - and you have my top ten stands.