This year’s edition of the avant garde photo art fair Unseen featured 140 exhibitors in total. There were 53 galleries from around the world showcasing artists, including 19 galleries exhibiting for the first time.
© Maud Chalard & Théo Gosselin
Beside the main exhibition compound, the fair spread to several venues throughout the town.
Promesas de Saliva, from the series Rage of Devotion, by Lisa Ambrosio
More than 60 female photographers were on show, and subjects ranged from globalisation and the climate crisis, via abstract and experimental photography, portraiture and body photography, to political and urban landscapes.
Skulz, from series The Years of Snake, by Delphone Diallo
The main difference between Unseen and other major fairs is its dual nature as both a high-end art photo fair and a contemporary photography festival. Artistic director Marina Paulenka said: “We want to bridge worlds and erase boundaries between high-end and make it accessible for everyone to appreciate contemporary photography.”
Paulenka, a native of Zagreb in Croatia, was on her way to the Venice Biennale in May when the call came through of her appointment by Unseen. She admits to being in tears. One of her first contributions was to bring French artist Tabita Rezaire, whose work is about decolonisation and has observed that today’s internet cables follow the slavery routes of old.
Clockwise from top left: Premium Connect; Recaptiulation installation; Sugar Walls Teardom, by Tabita Rezaire, courtesy Goodman Gallery
When asked if it was a bit cheeky to showcase an artist who predominantly uses video installation, Paulenka’s answered that photography was constantly evolving and pushing boundaries.
Joana Choumali
Joana Choumali comes from Ivory Coast, and is exhibited by Gallery 1957 from Accra in Ghana. Her mixed-media photographs, overlaid with embroidered details in vivid colours, are truly a joyous spectacle.
Trapped Soul (top), Waves Under My Eyelids and Eleutheria 2, from the series Albahian, by Joana Choumali, courtesy Gallery 1957
Her inspiration for this style came after a long and traumatic illness, during which she taught herself embroidery as a therapeutic exercise. It was the first light of the day whose colour Choumali wanted to capture.
Her work will also be exhibited at the V&A museum in London as a part of Prix Pictet 19, which opens on 14 November.
Liz Nielsen
Liz Nielsen’s abstract landscapes vibrate with colour and layers, each telling a story. The American artist (presented by Black Box Projects) adheres to one of the first experimental photographic techniques: the photogram. She works in complete darkness, save for the occasional use of mobile phone light bounced off the ceiling, to create colours in the most basic ways without lenses.
The Meeting, above left, and Pyramid, top, from the Interdimensional Landscapes series (2019); above right: Cosmic Stone Stack, from the series The Arrival (2018) by Liz Nielsen/Black Box Projects
The Interdimensional Landscapes series was shot on a road trip in Yellowstone national park in Utah that turned out to be tragic and has a very personal meaning.
David Favrod
The Ibasho gallery exhibited artist David Favrod, who is of Swiss-Japanese heritage but is currently based in Spain. His work combines manga and anime-style drawings with photography. He usually starts by sketching. Or, in the case of an artwork titled The Fall (La Chute), by digging a hole for a week.
Clockwise from top left: The Day of the Fires; Les 4 Cols, from the Sound of the Black Waves series; work-in-progress shots of The Fall; Une Pluie de Sardines © David Favrod, courtesy Ibasho
As there was a boulder beneath where he began digging, he used Photoshop to make the hole look deeper. After scanning the photograph, and 2,500 hours of Photoshop drawing later, the image was finished.
His surreal work A Shower of Sardines, meanwhile, resembles Magritte in a manga style.
Mustapha Azeroual
At first sight, the work of French-Moroccan light artist Mustapha Azeroual (Galerie Binome) could be taken as being inspired by cubism. His technique involves capturing several images on the same film, transferring them on to a single image, and therefore distorting them in a multistage process of capturing and deconstructing, before merging them again. These untitled works from his series Radiance feature four different locations superimposed into one.
Sans titre #0005 (top); Sans titre #1302 and Sans titre #0004, from the series ACTIN, 2019 by Mustapha Azeroual, courtesy Galerie Binome.
Jana Sophia Nolle
Jana Sophia Nolle’s socially charged series Living Room (Catharine Clark Gallery) places the shelters of some of San Francisco’s homeless into affluent domestic interiors. The intimacy and vulnerability of the shelters is emphasised by the stable structures of the living rooms, with their paintings and bookshelves. It offers a different take on the concept of privacy, and emphasises the value of security, by comparison to the temporary refuge used by the growing number of homeless people in the second richest city in the US.
San Francisco, from the series Living Room, by Jana Sophia Nolle, courtesy Catharine Clark Gallery
David Uzochukwu
Slab, top; Bouyant, left; Uprising, right, both from the series Drown in Magic (2019) by David Uzochukwu, courtesy Galerie Number 8
Twenty-year-old David Uzochukwu (Galerie Number 8), was the youngest artist on show at Unseen this year, and his observations on race and migration are powerful and somewhat disturbing. One photograph, Uprising, involves fish Photoshopped to look like a serpent. He draws inspiration from Greek mythology, but Bleeding Body Near Water is a direct parallel with migrant crossings into Europe. Uzochukwu is of mixed Austrian and Nigerian heritage, and lives in Belgium. His everyday experiences of racial bias permeate his work.
HyperFocal by Simon Roberts
There were many other artists at Unseen deserving of mention, including Simon Roberts, whose magical forest landscapes could have come straight out of Lord of the Rings ; Charles Xelot, who shows Nenet reindeer herders filling the void of Siberian Arctic; Parisa Aminolahi, whose work deals with homeland, exile and childhood memories; and Xing, an online female collective.
Reindeer race by Charles Xelot, left; Tehran diaries by Parisa Aminolahi, right
Foot face 9 by Xing
