Book review of Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now

30/11/17

Book review of Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now

By Fiona Rogers & Max Houghton

Published by Thames & Hudson

There has been no shortage of books on female photographers appearing over recent months, so what does this compendium, published by Thames & Hudson this autumn, add to the library that its predecessors haven’t already provided? Certainly many of the artists included have been represented elsewhere, and some of the images are beginning to feel a little overly familiar – but, in a world where Helmut Newton’s vampy erotica or Robert Doisneau’s iconic Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville (1950) are recognisable in the flash of an eye, why shouldn’t Juno Calypso’s saccharine pink Honeymoon series nymphets (2015-16) and Natasha Caruana’s faceless brides (Fairytale for Sale series, 2011) be just as familiar and ubiquitous?

Read the full review here

Book Review of Girl on Girl. Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze

11/05/17

Girl on Girl. Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze.

By Charlotte Jansen

Hardback, 192 pages

ISBN 9781780679556

Published by Laurence King Publishing

£19.99 retail

“We see photographs of women every day, but we are used to looking at them in a few specific contexts,” writes editor Charlotte Jansen, in the introduction to her new book, Girl on Girl. Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze. “On products and billboards, in shop windows and magazine covers, in erotica and pornography.” The premise behind the book, however, is that there is a rapidly growing number of women out there photographing women, creating images where both the subject and the “gaze” are female. “At times,” Jansen continues, “there seems to be little difference between how women photograph women and how men photograph women, but women have the right to self-objectify and to exploit without critique, just as men have been allowed to do since the earliest forms of art emerged”. And here, Jansen offers 40 international female photographers the opportunity to present their work, their aims and their motivations neutrally and without critique, albeit opening themselves up for critical response.

Read the full review here

Film overview: When the Heavens Meet the Earth at Heong Gallery, Downing College, Cambridge

09/03/17

When the Heavens Meet the Earth 

Heong Gallery, Downing College, Cambridge

25 February - 21 May 2017

When the Heavens Meet the Earth – the fourth exhibition at the Heong Gallery at Downing College, Cambridge is showcasing a small

selection from Robert Devereux’s African art, or Sina Jina, collection.

In 2010, the multimillionaire, formerly a partner in the Virgin empire and Richard Branson’s brother-in-law, sold off two-thirds of his collection of postwar British art and used the £4 million proceeds to set up a charity supporting artists in Africa. The African Arts Trust, as it was named, supports grassroots organisations, which, in turn, support African artists with basic needs such as studios and residencies.

The exhibition specifically seeks to include some lesser-known artists, but there are some established names as well, including El Anatsui, 2013 Turner Prize nominee Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Ibrahim Mahama, who showed in Venice in 2015 and currently has an exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey, London. Another well-known name is the South African photographer Zanele Muholi, whose work with the LGBTQ community places her at continual risk in a censorious and critical society.

Ranging across photography, painting, sculpture and film, the exhibition evidences the wealth of artistic creativity and output from the second largest continent in the world.

Studio International spoke to Devereux at the opening of the exhibition.

Watch this film here

Fleshtones: The Lesbian Nude

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Review of Frieze Talks: Sexuality, Politics and Protest at Frieze London Art Fair 2013

21/10/13

Frieze London Art Fair 2013

Frieze Talks: Sexuality, Politics and Protest

Friday 18 October 2013, 13:30

Neil Bartlett (Theatre Director, Author and Performer, Brighton)

Marlene McCarty (Artist, New York)

Zanele Muholi (Photographer, Johannesburg)

Chair: Jennifer Kabat (Writer, New York)

Political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) drew a strict distinction between ‘labour’ (‘animal laborans’) – the biological processes of the human body: spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay; ‘work’ (‘homo faber’) – once you start employing implements and separating yourself from nature, creating an artificial world of things; and ‘action’ (‘vita activa’) – political acts, such as speech acts, which separate and distinguish one man from another, but which take place directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter. As such, she placed art firmly within the realm of work, not action, since, generally speaking, it creates a tangible product.

Obviously, however, things are not quite this clear cut. For starters, art, if you allow for performance art in particular, does not always leave behind a tangible trace. Moreover, however, art is very commonly employed for political purposes: to express a particular viewpoint, or to protest against the status quo. 

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.divamag.co.uk/category/arts-entertainment/art-as-activism-artists-debate-at-frieze