Paris Photo : 23e édition — Secteur curiosa — Les Galeries nationales du Grand Palais — Event — Slash Paris

Past: November 7 → 10, 2019

The Curiosa sector, inaugurated in 2018, is dedicated this year to emerging artists. Curated by Osei Bonsu (British-Ghanaian curator and writer), this year’s theme addresses photography’s increasingly unstable relationship to the physical world.

This selection of 14 projects will illuminate the multiple realities of human experience while drawing attention to the non-visible in thoughtful and innovative ways.

Andrès Denegri

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1975

Exhibition View, 2015 Rolf Art

Forgetting mechanisms is an installation that gathers together three works. The central piece is the one that names the entire installation. It is an intervened 16mm film proyector which its mechanics has been altered to destroy the films in it reproduced.

The cinema — understood as memory technology or as a document — by incinerating the image at the same time that it is reproduced, denies that capacity of documententary memory, turning itself into an allegory of the processes of forgetting and refusing history. The projected images — of an Argentine flag hoisted — come from the first filming archive in national territory (1897).

When the film is stopped by the altered projector, and the photogram begins to melt, the physical destruction of the film terrify us because itself represents the loss of a real thing. This anxiety prevent us stopping in what is really original, unrepeatable and unique, which is the image of each frame in its transformation process.

Elsa Leydier

Born in France, in 1988; lives and works in Rio de Janeiro

Elsa Leydier, Untitled#4, Les Échappées, 2018 Print on paper — 23 25/64 × 33 5/64 in Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Intervalle

Elsa Leydier is interested in the power of photography on the representation of territories and reprograms her political office. From photographs taken in the forest (Platanos con Platino & Braços Verdes Olhos Cheios de Asas_), Elsa Leydier reproduces a nature that borrows its colors from Pop Art and its aesthetic codes to luxury. It highlights the role of the image in the construction of the imaginary and gives back to these places the value they have lost. Each image is a botanical plank of a preserved paradise found. Iconic images gleaned from the social networks (_Brazil System Error) portray a brave Brazil.

The artist inserts into their text code violent sentences said by the candidate Jair Bolsonaro, current president of Brazil. This digital alteration (glitching) produces visual interference. The iconoclastic artist reveals the failing image of / in power. In Les Echappées, Elsa Leydier re-poetises topographic maps and statistics. Always by manipulation, these images are born from the association of maps of Brazil, whose mark has been erased, with images of nature. The artist thus attenuates the strength of these images in the service of power

Nate Lewis

Born in Beaver Falls, USA, in 1985; lives and works between Washington DC and New York

Nate Lewis, Signals, 2018 Hand-sculpted paper inkjet print — 28h × 23w in Courtesy of the artist & Fridman Gallery, New York

Nate Lewis is interested in the unseen. His work is driven by empathy, and the desire to understand nuanced points of view. By altering photographs, he aims to challenge people’s perspectives on race and history through distortion and illusion. Combining aspects of photography, etching, and ink drawing, Nate Lewis’ paper sculptures reflect his nine years of experience as a critical-care nurse. He scrapes and lifts the top layer of photographic paper to create evocative textures with surgical precision. Treating the paper like an organism itself, he sculpts patterns akin to cellular tissue and anatomical elements, allowing hidden histories and patterns to be uncovered from the photographs. Ultimately, the work embraces humanistic ideas of human connection and understanding.