Devout, 2004 Mixed Media · 189 X 300 Cm · Unique Print

144 BESART / GILBERT & GEORGE 145 BESART / GILBERT & GEORGE

Gilbert & George

Gilbert (1943, San Martino, Italy) and George (1942, Devon, United Kingdom) met in 1967 when studying at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, in London, and they have been working together since then as a single entity. Since the end of the 1960s they have been living in Spitalﬁelds, a neighbourhood in London’s East End, close to the City of London. The Singing Sculpture (1969) was the title of the performance with which the artists assumed themselves as a ‘living sculpture’ – literally, their life as art – and with which they presented themselves to the art world in the 1970s, fast gaining international recognition. Their ‘performance’ consisted of both artists, their skin painted in a single colour (sculpture), standing on a table (pedestal) singing a folk song about the daily life of two wanderers. The notion of ‘art for all’ is the driving force behind their art: work relating to daily life in a direct and accessible manner. Both artists state that all the subjects they wanted to deal with were found in the streets around their house and that the entire world (referring to the notion of Babylon) is condensed in those London streets. Concerns, issues and social taboos were simultaneously mixed with a questioning of artistic conventions, translated into a language that used performances, video, drawings and photography. Since the 1980s Gilbert & George have chosen to mainly work with large-size photography, with their self- representation always in dialogue with religious symbols, grafﬁti, excrements and newspaper headlines overlapping the images of their ageing bodies. The work Devout (2004) is represented in panels (which became their signature style) comprised of a grid of varying numbers, with large life-size colourful representations using primary colours. In this case, their focus, frequently repeated in their work, is the Christian religion, seen here from an ironic, problematic and parodying point of view – synthesising elements that arise from their approach.

Maria do Mar Fazenda

Selected bibliography Gilbert & George. Major Exhibition, Tate, London, 2007. Gilbert & George. Intimate Conversations with François Jonquet, Phaidon, London, 2004. Carter Ratcliff, Robert Rosenblum, Gilbert & George. The Singing Sculpture, Thames and Hudson, London, 1993. Gilbert & George. New Democratic Pictures, Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, 1992. Gilbert & George. The Complete Pictures 1971-1985, Thames and Hudson, London, 1986.

Devout, 2004 Mixed media · 189 x 300 cm · Unique print

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 144 22/12/08 19:13:58 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 145 22/12/08 19:21:10 146 BESART / NAN GOLDIN

Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (1953, Washington, USA) marked an era. An entire lifestyle, of heroin chic, grunge style, and magazines like the Face and I-D, in other words, a whole generation was inspired by the photographs taken by Nan Goldin during the 1980s. Nan Goldin ‘forged a genre, where photography became more influential than ever before in the last twenty years’ stated The New York Times in 2003. And that genre was reproduced, copied and distributed like no other. To the point where it cannibalised its own creator, trivialising her images and dissolving her authorship. Hence the great importance of looking back at Goldin’s work. Nan Goldin started her career as an artist documenting her group of friends and their everyday life in an impulse that the artist herself says to have started with the trauma of her sister’s suicide and the subsequent anxiety in trying to preserve her memories. It was however when she moved to New York in 1978 that she discovered the motivation that would accompany her to this day. She would find her models at the Bowery, firstly documenting the post-punk and new age movements at the beginning of the 1980s, subsequently discovering the vibrant gay scene that would continue to fascinate her. That is where, quoting Bertold Brecht, she would produce her first emblematic exhibition: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). Her photographs document a lifestyle in which the use of drugs and alcohol is abundant and where signs of physical violence are revealed, insinuating abu- sive relationships. But mostly, through the use of flash and high contrasts, the photographs create a penetrating aesthetic aura that emanates a sense of romanticism and transforms its protagonists into icons of transgression and individuality. Someone once wrote that Nan Goldin’s photographs represent a private journey revealed to the public, when in fact what they really represent is the historic moment in which all that is private became public and there is no difference between intimacy and exposure. Intimacy is exposure.

Ana Pinto

Selected bibliography Devil’s Playground, Phaidon, London, 2003. Nan Goldin. Recent Photographs, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 1999. Couples and Loneliness, Korinsha Press, Tokyo, 1998. Emotions and Relations, Taschen, Cologne, 1998. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Aperture, New York, 1986.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 146 22/12/08 19:21:10 146 BESART / NAN GOLDIN 147 BESART / NAN GOLDIN

Nan Goldin

Ana Pinto

Bruno smiling at Valérie out of the shadow, Paris, 2001 Silver Dye Bleach Print (Ilfochrome) · 101.5 x 70 cm · Edition 3/5

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 146 22/12/08 19:21:10 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 147 22/12/08 19:21:11 148 BESART / NAN GOLDIN

Jimmy Paulette on David’s Bike, NYC, 1991 Silver Dye Bleach Print (Ilfochrome) · 44 x 64 cm · Edition 12/25

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 148 22/12/08 19:21:13 148 BESART / NAN GOLDIN 149 BESART / NAN GOLDIN

Jimmy Paulette on David’s Bike, NYC, 1991 Silver Dye Bleach Print (Ilfochrome) · 44 x 64 cm · Edition 12/25 Mysty in Sheridan Square, NYC, 1991 Silver Dye Bleach Print (Ilfochrome) · 76.2 x 101.6 cm · Edition 19/25

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 148 22/12/08 19:21:13 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 149 22/12/08 19:21:14 150 BESART / PIERRE GONNORD

Pierre Gonnord

Famous for his photographic portraits of different urban tribes captured either on the street or in his studio since 1998, Pierre Gonnord (1963, Cholet, France) is a self-taught artist who, since his teens, has been fascinated by the great masters of portraiture, both in photography and painting. This dedication to the genre has developed itself in series in which those portrayed are always connected or somehow related (be it because of their youth, lifestyle, the place where they live or social status), although they maintain their own individuality in the collective imaginary. Gonnord focuses mainly on the ex- pressivity of the subjects’ look and chooses to only show the upper body of those selected. He does so to explore the capacity that such framing – from the face to the shoulders – has of reflecting the personality of each subject and its inscription in a specific culture. Hence the attention given to the most subtle details in the physiognomy of the human body (beauty spots, scars, tattoos, little wounds, etc), taking an interest in all that it can imply simultaneously: difference and sameness, individuality and being part of a community or group A good example are the photographs taken in Madrid (where he has lived for over a decade), Paris or Tokyo and which are part of his different series, poign- antly titled Fashion (1998), Interiores (1999), Regards / Miradas (2000), City (2001) and Far East (the latter presented in 2003 during his second and significant solo exhibition held at the Galeria Juana de Aizpuru in Madrid). These works present faces emerging from dark backgrounds, stating a presence that is both unique while also part of a common thread that runs through each series. These are characters that evoke life stories, sometimes marginal, usually marked by experiences of migration and that result from a dialogue with the history of art, quoting some of its pictorial antecedents, including Caravaggio, Goya, Murillo, Ribera and Velazquez, among others. This contribution to the genealogy of the genre was presented succinctly presented in one of Gonnord’s most significant exhibitions in 2007 at Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla, in which the contemporary faces photographed by Gonnord shared the space with the museum’s collection of baroque portraits.

Lúcia Marques

Selected bibliography Pierre Gonnord. Testigos, Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, 2008. Pierre Gonnord. Regards, TF Editores, Madrid, 2005. Pierre Gonnord, Maison européenne de la photo, Paris, 2005.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 150 22/12/08 19:21:15 150 BESART / PIERRE GONNORD 151 BESART / PIERRE GONNORD

Pierre Gonnord

Lúcia Marques

Akinori, 2003 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) mounted on Diasec · 100 x 100 cm · Edition 1/3 Eva, 2003 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) mounted on Diasec · 100 x 100 cm · Edition 2/3

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 150 22/12/08 19:21:15 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 151 22/12/08 19:21:20 152 BESART / DOUGLAS GORDON

Douglas Gordon

Douglas Gordon (1966, Glasgow, Scotland) explores language, communication and memory in a dual sense. For the artist text is an image. Sentences, often intimidating instructions, are distributed via letters or e-mails, left via telephone messages, inscribed on the walls of an exhibition space or tattooed on a body. The artist is mainly interested in dichotomies and the fight between good and evil is one of the most evident in his work. In Never, Never (Black, Negative, Mirrored) (2000), the tattooed word reminds us of the permanent character of a tattoo and in a symbolic way of the lasting of a relationship. The work is related to the diptych Never, Never (2000) and recalls Robert Mapplethorpe’s famous self-portrait of 1975, in which the artist’s arm horizontally crosses the empty image. In Self Portrait You+Me (Jayne Mansfield), the viewer is integrated into the work through the erasion of the elements that identify the portrayed character. They are replaced by mirrors in a game of (in)visibile identities. The stars in this series are different Bond Girls and the violence imposed on their portraits by fire suggests an iconic adoration. These works remind us of the logic of his Hollywood Blind Stars, in which the starts’ eyes have been replaced by mirrored, white or black planes. Black Spot (Negative) is the amplification of a spot that punctuates the palm of the hand (visible in his previous work with 13 photographs, Hand with Spot, 2001). Similarly to the tattoos, this is a mark, here associated with guilt and death sentences, a reference to the novel Treasure Island (1883) by Robert Louis Stevenson. The importance of this series is accentuated by the fact that the artist had an exhibition with the same title at Tate Liverpool in 2000. Gordon won the Turner Prize in 1996 and the Premio 2000 at the 1997 Venice Biennial. In 1999 he had a solo exhibition at Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon.

Luísa Especial

Selected bibliography Douglas Gordon. Superhumanatural, National Galleries of Scotland, Glasgow, 2007 Douglas Gordon. Timeline. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2006. El que vols que digui... Jo ja soc mort, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 2006. Black Spot, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, 2000. Douglas Gordon. Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, 1999.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 152 22/12/08 19:21:20 152 BESART / DOUGLAS GORDON 153 BESART / DOUGLAS GORDON

Douglas Gordon

Luísa Especial

Never, Never (Black, Negative, Mirrored), 2000 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 61 x 76 cm · Edition 2/13 Self Portrait You+Me (Jayne Mansﬁ eld), 2006 Chromogenic Process (C-Print), burnt · 90.5 x 80.5 cm · Unique print

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 152 22/12/08 19:21:20 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 153 22/12/08 19:21:26 154 BESART / MARGARIDA GOUVEIA

Margarida Gouveia

Margarida Gouveia (1977, Lisbon, Portugal) studied design and completed her post-graduate degree in photography at Ar.Co, Centro de Artes Visuais e Comunicação, in Lisbon. In her only recently established career a contemporary vision of photography used as art is prevalent. Gouveia creates manufactured or manipulated images that invariably deal with issues of lightness, the creation of images using clips, reassembly or staging. Her often large-scale pictures propose an ironic reﬂection on the presence of the body within the landscape, sometimes with subtle references to the history of photography itself. The image included in this collection is in fact an example of that. Taken at Ar.Co, in Almada (Portugal), it apparently is a simple photograph of a female model. The position of the legs, however, in the way they stand out from the torso and move through the picture towards the viewer remind us of the series La Poupée (1936/1975), by Hans Bellmer. If the concept of doppelgänger, an automaton and double, was for this surrealist photographer suggested by the representation of the female body reconﬁgured and meta-morphed by the manipulation of doll’s bodies, for Gouveia the quote suggests an ironic and apparently playful reference to the status of the female body as an object of representation. The reference to Bellmer has been recurring regularly in the recent history of photography (for instance in its appropriation by Cindy Sherman). However, the way Gouveia uses it shows a clear deviation from the allusion to the intense perversion that formed the main motivation for the surrealist photographer. The image in the collection is, therefore, representative of the round of doubles, absences and identities that populate the photographs by Gouveia, also pointing (in an almost didactic way) towards some of the origins of her most recent work.

Delﬁm Sardo

Selected bibliography Ar.Co Bolseiros & Finalistas 05, Ar.Co, Lisbon, 2006.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 154 22/12/08 19:21:26 154 BESART / MARGARIDA GOUVEIA 155 BESART / MARGARIDA GOUVEIA

Margarida Gouveia

Delﬁm Sardo

Selected bibliography Ar.Co Bolseiros & Finalistas 05, Ar.Co, Lisbon, 2006.

Untitled, 2004 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 120 x 140 cm · Edition of 3 + AP

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 154 22/12/08 19:21:26 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 155 22/12/08 19:21:39 156 BESART / DAN GRAHAM

Dan Graham

Dan Graham (1942, Urbana, IL, USA) is often assigned a pioneering role in the conceptual use of photography, specifically in the work Homes for America (1966), a magazine article with both text and images and which was always intended to operate both inside and outside the field of art. Currently, the project is deemed an exemplary conceptual piece, although it raised some difficulties for the history of art at the time; how could one classify a work balancing between archives and artistic practice, using ordinary photographs, which are in many aspects similar to images used in the real estate industry? During the 1960s, Californian suburban areas became in fact a case study for Dan Graham. The repetition of elements in the monotonous and modular architecture would allow him on the one hand to create photographic records that shared the concerns of minimalist architecture: the absence of composition and the simple depletion of associative possibilities. On the other hand, he was interested in working in a social and politically problematic context. Graham did not want to be limited, in his very own words, to reproducing purely visual or phenomenological effects: ‘[...] I wanted to show that minimalism referred to an actual social situation that could be documented’. Contradicting the idea that suburbs were a less dignified context for intellectual reflection and artistic creation, Dan Graham decided to obsessively shoot the suburbs. However, the suburban issue in his work is never related to the American tradition from the school of Walker Evans, which documented the lifestyle of the workers from a humanist and psychological point of view. Dan Graham would in fact be one of the first artists to use photography as a possibility for capturing self-expression, psychology, originality, and subjectivity.

Ricardo Nicolau

Selected bibliography Pietro Valle, Adachiara Zevi, Dan Graham. Half Square Half Crazy, Charta, Milan, 2005. Marianne Brouwer, Benjamin Buchloh, Eric de Bruyn, Corinne Diserens, Markus Muller, Dan Graham. Catalogue Raisonné, Richter Verlag, New York, 2001. David Campany, ‘Conceptual Art History or A Home for Homes for America’, in Rewriting Conceptual Art, Reaktion Books, London, 1999, pp. 129-139. Dan Graham, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, 1997. Brian Wallis (ed.), Rock My Religion: Writings and Projects 1965-1990, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1994.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 156 22/12/08 19:21:40 156 BESART / DAN GRAHAM 157 BESART / DAN GRAHAM

Dan Graham

Ricardo Nicolau

Battery Park – 2 Way Mirror Ofﬁce Building, New York, N.Y., 1991 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 65.4 x 55.9 cm · Unique print High Rise Apartment, 1996 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 65.4 x 55.9 cm · Unique print

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 156 22/12/08 19:21:40 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 157 22/12/08 19:21:42 158 BESART / DAN GRAHAM

Dan Graham Above: Tourist-bus Portugal, 1980 Below: New Highway Restaurant in New Housing Development, Jersey City, N.Y., 1967 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 76 x 54 cm · Unique print

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 158 22/12/08 19:21:45 158 BESART / DAN GRAHAM 159 BESART / RODNEY GRAHAM

Rodney Graham

Being an artist who deals with science and narratives in popular culture, Rodney Graham (1949, Abbotsford, Canada) is one of the most relevant figures in contemporary art. His multidisciplinary approach, often supported by strategies of appropriation, is carried out through the use of an extensive palette of media including, among others, installations, music, video and photography. Appearing on the international scene associated with the so-called ‘Vancouver School’, alongside artists such as Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace, Graham’s contact with conceptual art allowed him to integrate textual and theoretical elements and, using photography, to concentrate in his work on the development of ‘ideas’. Despite the stylistic and thematic diversity in his practice, a series of core interests and subjects can be identified: rock music, literature, and relations between nature and culture or art history. Old Growth Cedar (#2) Seymour Reservoir (2002) is the image of an inverted tree that we can associate with a series started in the 1980s and that references another work, Camera Obscura (1979), a structure shaped as a pinhole camera used by Rodney Graham for taking the first of ‘his’ tree images. The optical mechanism of the pinhole camera (which projects inverted images through the effect of light in the dark) is evoked to question not only the nature of our perception, but also the representation of nature itself. Paradoxical Western Scene (2006) is inspired by the cover of a record by country musician Marty Robbins and quotes the iconography of Westerns. We see the figure of a cowboy – Rodney Graham – and close to him, a poster repeated to infinity – like a mise en abîme. A celebratory or ironic scene, it suggests to the viewer revelations or senses that fail to ever arrive. Rodney Graham participated in the Venice Biennial in 1997, as the official representative for Canada and his work has been exhibited since the 1980s in the most important international museums. In 2006, Graham was awarded the Kurt- Schwitters-Preis.

José Marmeleira

Selected bibliography Wet on Wet: My Late Early Styles – The Middle Period, Walther König, Cologne, 2008. Grant Arnold, Lynne Cooke, et al., Rodney Graham: A Little Thought, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Art Gallery of Ontario, Ontario, 2004. Josee Belisle, Rodney Graham: A Group of Literary, Musical, Sculptural, Photographic and Film Pieces, Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal, Montreal, 2006. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Anthony Spira, et al., Rodney Graham, Hatje Cantz, Ostﬁldern, 2003. Yves Gevaert, Jeff Wall, et al., Rodney Graham. Works from 1976 to 1994, Art Gallery of York University, Toronto, 1994.

Dan Graham Above: Tourist-bus Portugal, 1980 Below: New Highway Restaurant in New Housing Development, Jersey City, N.Y., 1967 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 76 x 54 cm · Unique print

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 158 22/12/08 19:21:45 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 159 22/12/08 19:21:45 160 BESART / RODNEY GRAHAM

Old Growth Cedar (#2), Seymour Reservoir, 2002 Gelatin silver print · 183 x 130.5 cm · Edition 3/4 Paradoxical Western Scene, 2006 Transparency by chromogenic process, mounted in lightbox · 147.3 x 121.9 x 17.8 cm · Edition 3/5 ≥

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 160 22/12/08 19:21:48 160 BESART / RODNEY GRAHAM 161 BESART /

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 160 22/12/08 19:21:48 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 161 22/12/08 19:36:54 162 BESART / ANDREAS GURSKY

Andreas Gursky

After having been successively presented as a postmodern fetish, Andreas Gursky’s (1955, Leipzig, Germany) work started to be analysed as a reference for the return to pictorial photography embedded in the image-picture, which we are now used to reading as a conceptual synthesis. Gursky’s are monumental images of a timeless event, formally organised by a single perspective or a generalisation that can easily be perceived as a model, such as the diptych 99 Cent II (2001), but also Düsseldorf Airport (1987) or even May Day V (2006). Gursky usually photographs urban landscapes in which man, shortened by the concept of a distant landscape, is no more significant than any other constituting element. What we see are public spaces (such as a beach) or built forms – air- ports, supermarkets, the stock market – or any fragment of a functioning urban landscape which we are led to recognise as a significant whole. The organisation of this whole is so convincing that, like the landscapes that represent our modern age, we perceive them less as a representation than as images that make us comprehend them as a separately understood group, which brings us closer to the concept of urban space than of allegory, fragment or realism, since the image has lost its function of naturalist evidence. But adhering to the model is not easy since the photographer is faithful to contemporary conceptualism and suggests the differentness of the photograph: we acknowledge the urban landscape, captivated by the organisation of the image-picture and a firm optical knowledge, but at the same time we feel in an ambiguous manner its strangeness, emphasising the conviction that it is only a photograph, which denies its wholeness. In the photograph Schnorchler, Rias Bajas, from 1988, the urban beach is underlined by the presence of swimmers who are lost in the totality of the landscape, while a shadow categorically divides the beach, which suggests the presence of sensations and not only perceptions. The 2004 image Dior Homme, gains the horizontality of a geometric continuum and in which the identification of detail dissolves, reducing the synthesis to an aestheticising fusion – like a metaphor.

Maria do Carmo Serén

Selected bibliography Andreas Gursky. Architecture, Hatje Cantz, Ostﬁldern, 2008. Andreas Gursky, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002. Andreas Gursky. Photographs from 1984 to the Present, Te Neues, Kempen, 2001. Andreas Gursky. Photographs 1994-1997, Hatje Cantz, Ostﬁldern, 1998. Andreas Gursky. Montparnasse, Portikus, Frankfurt; Oktagon, Stuttgard, 1995.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 162 22/12/08 19:36:54 162 BESART / ANDREAS GURSKY 163 BESART / ANDREAS GURSKY

Andreas Gursky

Maria do Carmo Serén

Schnorchler, Rias Bajas, 1988 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 59 x 75 cm · Edition 9/12

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 162 22/12/08 19:36:54 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 163 22/12/08 19:36:57 164 BESART / ANDREAS GURSKY

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 164 22/12/08 19:37:04 164 BESART / ANDREAS GURSKY 165 BESART / ANDREAS GURSKY

Dior Homme, 2004 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 187 x 371.3 cm · Edition 6/6

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 164 22/12/08 19:37:04 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 165 22/12/08 19:37:07 166 BESART / JOÃO MARIA GUSMÃO AND PEDRO PAIVA

João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva

This artists’ duo has been working as such since they studied together at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Lisbon University. João Maria Gusmão (1979, Lisbon, Portugal) and Pedro Paiva (1977, Lisbon, Portugal) have met with a deserved and growing international recognition and despite their brief but intense exhibition career, have participated in the biennials of São Paulo (2006) and Mercosul (2007), the Triennial of Luanda (2006) and PHotoEspaña (2008). They have also had regular solo exhibitions in the last six years, both in Portugal and abroad. Their collective practice has mainly used Super 8 films, but also photography and sculpture, more recently adopting the format of installations, thus trying to benefit from the technical and semantic specificity of each element and articu- lating them as a whole in each intervention. Their work is also characterised by a strong theoretical grounding, with the creation of texts based on seminal authors in the fields of philosophy, aesthetics and literature, including Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Alfred Jarry, René Daumal and Victor Hugo, among others, to explore in a creative way a group of semi-scientific themes. Homem Magnético [magnetic man] (2004) is an example that results from the speculative ideal around phenomena associated with the affection of the body. It is one of a range of typological developments created by the artists, using the documentary quality of photography, as well as its capacity to provide a level of concreteness and visibility to a staged event or effect. This fictional model, achieved through the fabrication of a truth captured through the specificity of certain optical devices, was already present as an approach in one of the first exhibitions by Gusmão and Paiva, DeParamnésia, at Galeria ZDB / Tercenas do Marquês in 2002. Since then it has become deeply ingrained and reflected on in recent exhibitions such as Eflúvio Magnético (2004-2006) and Abissologia: Para uma Ciência Transitória do Indescernível (2008).

Lúcia Marques

Selected bibliography Abissología, Horizonte de Acontecimientos, Associação Zé dos Bois, Lisbon; La Fabrica Editorial, Madrid, 2008. Eﬂúvio Magnético, Associação Zé dos Bois, Lisbon, vol. 1, 2005. João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva. Intrusão: The Red Square, Museu do Chiado – Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon, 2005. Air Liquide, Ara – Galeria de Arte, Lisbon, 2002.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 166 22/12/08 19:37:07 166 BESART / JOÃO MARIA GUSMÃO AND PEDRO PAIVA 167 BESART / JOÃO MARIA GUSMÃO AND PEDRO PAIVA

João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva

Lúcia Marques

Homem Magnético, 2004 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) · 160 x 140 cm · Edition 2/3 + 1 AP

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 166 22/12/08 19:37:07 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 167 22/12/08 19:37:10 168 BESART / DANIEL GUSTAV CRAMER

Daniel Gustav Cramer

A large part of Daniel Gustav Cramer’s (1975, Neuss, Germany) work is care- 1 Charles Darwent, ‘Deep Waters’, fully organised into an ongoing photographic trilogy comprising Woodland, in Art Review, London, March 2006. Underwater and Mountain. The landscape categories chosen – surprisingly including the underwater world – evidence a search for unattainable and almost ideal places. The artist’s name also has three elements, like Karl Gustav Carus, who followed the great German romantic figures and with whom he shares his middle name. One could almost play ‘Infinite Library’ with both names, as in the artist’s homonym project, a in collaboration with Haris Epaminonda. The project consists of two books, X and Y, in which every second page from one book has been swapped with every second page from the other book. This ‘cut and paste’, with the free association of documents claiming a kind of timelessness, or rather, a detachment from time through the process of association, is characteristic of Cramer’s work method. From the title to the actual work, the relation with Romanticism appears to have an excessively attractive appeal. In fact, the contemplative experience of the landscape, with a point of view sufficiently extreme to be disturbing has motivated British critic Charles Darwent to speak of a ‘new sublime’.1 Cramer’s images effectively create a precise and almost scientific vision of the landscape that is immediately deconstructed through its inconclusiveness. However, as in the paintings by the great romantic painters, the point of view is essential. And here it is even more important as we are dealing with photography, that is, a record: someone was there. The two images presented here, Untitled (Woodland) #43, 2007 (2005), and Untitled (Mountain) #3, 2007 (2006), involve us in a landscape with a black and a light centre: they both project the viewer beyond what is visible, they show as much as they hide. Progressively the absence of ground, of scale reference points, and of the suffocating beauty of a nature in which man hardly has a place, create a doubt as to the reality of the image. One could wonder if this were a model or a manipulation. The technological actuality, the photographic tradition of opposing artifice to registering reality allows for this doubt. And knowing that Cramer has subjected himself to the whims of light and weather to make them, one cannot help but find a real pleasure in letting the question hover like a per- sistent mist. The artist received the Jerwood Photography Award in 2005.

Joana Neves

Selected bibliography Daniel Gustav Cramer, Haris Epaminonda, Inﬁnite Library, (edition of 13 unique copies), 2008. Charles Darwent, ‘Deep Waters’, in Art Review, London, March 2006. Craig Burnett, ‘Daniel Gustav Cramer’, in The Guardian, London, October 2004. Daniel Gustav Cramer, Untitled (Mother), Letter Press, London, 2003. www.danielgustavcramer.com

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 168 22/12/08 19:37:10 168 BESART / DANIEL GUSTAV CRAMER 169 BESART / DANIEL GUSTAV CRAMER

Daniel Gustav Cramer

Joana Neves

Untitled (mountain) #3, 2006 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 41 x 41 cm · Edition 1/5 Untitled (woodland) #43, 2005 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 41 x 41 cm · Edition 2/5

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 168 22/12/08 19:37:10 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 169 22/12/08 19:37:14 170 BESART / MONA HATOUM

Mona Hatoum

To Mona Hatoum (1952, Beirut, Lebanon) all means have creative possibilities. What is characteristic in her work is not the use of a specific medium, but the in- tensities she creates using the multiple resources that she applies in each of her works. And her work is intentionally intense, radical, disruptive. One of her most characteristic traits is the way she relates a very particular poetic to a political action and awareness. The typical locations of her work are related to violence, oppression, voyeurism, but in all of them a reference to the human body – acting as expressive device and catalyst of perceptive transformations – is present. It is in the body, or the reference to the human body, that Hatoum finds the centre towards which all different reactions to her work converge: beauty and horror, desire and repulsion. Regardless of this predominant element in her work, either materially or formally, the effect she always achieves places the viewer in contact with con- flicting emotions, challenging them to find the meaning behind the constructions. Through the way in which she reduces the mediation between the viewer and what is presented to them to a minimum, her entire œuvre has a sense of humour and it is almost surrealist in that sense. But humour is a resource used by the artist not as an effect but as a mechanism for understanding: the laughter some of her works provokes is a sign that we understand something that contradicts our expectation. It is a non-cynical laughter that marks the disagreement between what is common and what the artist presents. Static Portraits (2000) are a good example of the mechanisms called upon by the artist. Portraits in which, due to an invisible and uncontrollable action, the hair of those photographed interferes with the usual poses that are part of the aesthetics of portraiture. The double meaning of ‘static’ is relevant as it translates the concept of physics concerning the organism, physiognomy, human behaviour; the absence of movement indicated by that concept is in fact an illusion because everything is always moving. And the results are portraits that, in some way, transmit the energy – or static load – that a still body contains. Usually they contain an invisible element made visible by the artist: faces filled with electricity. Energy which, due to its quietness, leaves the body through the hair. By representing that energy, Hatoum seems to underline the need for the human body to express itself with the aim of keeping its balance – in physics, static is also related to the study of body balance – the energy gathered in a body transforms itself into a gesture, a face, an image.

Nuno Crespo

Selected bibliography Mona Hatoum, Hatje Cantz, Ostﬁlfern, 2004. Mona Hatoum. Domestic Disturbance, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Francisco, 2001. Mona Hatoum, Phaidon, London, 1997.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 170 22/12/08 19:37:14 170 BESART / MONA HATOUM 171 BESART / MONA HATOUM

Mona Hatoum

Nuno Crespo

Selected bibliography Mona Hatoum, Hatje Cantz, Ostﬁlfern, 2004. Mona Hatoum. Domestic Disturbance, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Francisco, 2001. Mona Hatoum, Phaidon, London, 1997.

Static Portraits (Galen), 2000 Polaroid print · 72 x 56 cm · Unique print Static Portraits (Karl), 2000 Polaroid print · 72 x 56 cm · Unique print Static Portraits (Lisa), 2000 Polaroid print · 72 x 56 cm · Unique print

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 170 22/12/08 19:37:14 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 171 22/12/08 19:37:17 172 BESART / CANDIDA HÖFER

Candida Höfer

The photographs by Candida Höfer (1944, Eberswalde, Germany) are concerned with the aesthetic quality of space and its limits, and the relationships created through the eye with magnitudes determined by architecture and sculpture. The choices she makes are not driven by any kind of documentary, historical or cultural interest. They are not postcards or investigations into the multicultural and global world we live in either. Her drive is, first and foremost, purely photographic: she has developed a strictly aesthetic programme in which photographic objectivity is the main principle, combined with an ambition of creating an objective, material and verifiable record of mundane things. The artist’s concern with the quality of the photographic subject is always present, opposing a certain contemporary trend for overrating what is shown and underrating the medium of photography in itself. It is a style and way of photographing guided by an exhaustive look at the spaces she eventually captures, by the discovery of the best point of view, which implies the discovery of a material point through which we can better observe the world around us, the things in it, and, ultimately, us. The subjective point of view, affected and with a pathological weight, is in Höfer’s works replaced by a kind of physical and material location point – Standpunkt, which means the geographical point at which one is physically located and from where it is possible to observe what exists. In her case, they are internal empty spaces. Her view, after being transformed into a photographic subject, comes with a deepening of perspective (and lens) in the visible layer of the spaces. From this type of mental gymnastics, an extreme and delicate organisation of the visual field arises, almost as if it were a painting. Note that the concern with the type of organisation and hierarchy expressed by an image (be it a painting, photograph or video) is constant in any image maker. The first historical example of the ‘image maker’ was painting and this is why the subject is used as matrix. In Höfer’s case, the selection of the location for taking the photograph is, in fact, related to a certain understanding of the spaces she finds. Therefore, the selection of the aspects that are to be valued in the images she creates corresponds with her choices and this frame of pictorial, or pictographic values, is the element that determines the final object, where a strong difference between image and photograph can be noticed.

Nuno Crespo

Selected bibliography José Saramago, Shelley Rice, Candida Höfer. Em Portugal/In Portugal, Schirmer/Mosel, Munich, 2007. Umberto Eco, Libraries, Schirmer/Mosel, Munich, 2006. Constance Glenn, Virginia Heckert, Mary-Kay Lombino, Candida Höfer: Architecture of Absence, Aperture, New York, 2005. Candida Höfer. Zwölf – Twelve, Schirmer/Mosel, Munich, 2003. Candida Höfer. Photographie, Schirmer/Mosel, Munich, 1998.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 172 22/12/08 19:37:17 172 BESART / CANDIDA HÖFER 173 BESART / CANDIDA HÖFER

Candida Höfer

Nuno Crespo

Rijksmuseum Amsterdam II, 2003 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 185 x 152 cm · Edition 5/6

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 172 22/12/08 19:37:17 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 173 22/12/08 19:37:20 174 BESART / CANDIDA HÖFER

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 174 22/12/08 19:37:23 174 BESART / CANDIDA HÖFER 175 BESART / CANDIDA HÖFER

Palácio Nacional da Ajuda Lisboa VIII, 2006 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 200 x 258 cm · Edition 1/3 AP + 6 Biblioteca do Palácio Nacional de Mafra III, 2006 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 152 x 171 cm · Edition 1/3 AP + 6 Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra III, 2006 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 260 x 200 cm · Edition 1/3 AP + 6

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 174 22/12/08 19:37:23 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 175 22/12/08 19:37:25 176 BESART / RONI HORN

Roni Horn

Roni Horn’s (1955, New York, NY, USA) work destabilises notions of identity. Her photographic exercises establish doubt concerning representation. She strips the image, confronting the viewer with what is visible and encouraging them to create an idea of what they see. The series This is Me, This is You (1999-2000) was, according to the artist, derived from a child’s linguistic behaviour, when the child pointing at an inanimate object in a book said ‘this is me’, and pointing to another object said ‘this is you’. The artist’s work bears evidence of an insistent search regarding projection. The permanent back and forth between a face, a head, a face and a landscape translates this concern in her relation to the act of naming. The artist questions this latter aspect by multiplying images of the same subject, element and object. Surprised by the diversity, one is led to conclude that identity is generated through relations rather than by a nominal singularity. In the series Some Thames (2000), exhibited at the Dia Art Foundation, New York, in 2002, and previously in 2001, at Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, the turbid waters of the Thames are photographed and exhibited progressively as a horizon spreading through the walls of the exhibition. This Heraclitean demon- stration of the instability of being is often evidenced through a reference to water, an element to which the artist has recently devoted a series of projects at the Stikkishólmur library, in Iceland (Vatnasafn/Library of Water, 2007). Clowd and Cloun (Blue) Group 2, 2000-2001, is a bold series of images. Here no one looks the viewer in the eye and the water element is as ethereal as the sexual identity that Roni Horn takes pleasure in erasing. The clown – an already asexual ﬁgure and without a deﬁned layout – is out of focus, moving. The cloud seems more stable, more soothing than the slightly anguished presence of the clown trapped in his de-characterisation. This enigmatic series is one of the most fascinating works created by Roni Horn, reminding us of the strength of the Untitled #... series: birds’ heads photographed from behind, with their long necks emanate an eroticism detached from any gender or identity. The artist is able to derive from both the clown and the bird an idea of pure emotion, not bound to the subject, and she moves unquestionably from name to adjective.

Joana Neves

Selected bibliography bird, Steidl, Göttingen, 2008. Rings of Lispector (Agua Viva), Steidl, Göttingen, 2006. Cabinet of, Steidl, Göttingen, 2003. If on a winter’s night…, Steidl, Göttingen, 2003. This is me, This is you, Edition 7L, Paris, 2002.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 176 22/12/08 19:37:25 176 BESART / RONI HORN 177 BESART / RONI HORN

Roni Horn

Joana Neves

Untitled (Fox), 1998 Inkjet prints (Iris Process) · 2 x (78 x 78.5 cm) · AP / Edition of 12 + AP

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 176 22/12/08 19:37:25 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 177 23/12/08 0:12:06 178 BESART / RONI HORN

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 178 23/12/08 0:12:12 178 BESART / RONI HORN 179 BESART / RONI HORN

Clowd and Cloun (Blue) Group 2, 2000-2001 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 3 x (68.58 x 88.9 cm); 3 x (68.58 x 68.58 cm) · Edition 4/4

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 178 23/12/08 0:12:12 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 179 23/12/08 0:12:15 180 BESART / SABINE HORNIG

Sabine Hornig

The artist Sabine Hornig (1964, Pforzheim, Germany) divides her practice into sculpture and photography, articulated in a way in which the two fields cross over to define complex and paradoxical spaces. In Hornig’s case photographs are often an integral element of sculptural environments, which in turn are similar to architectural models. Sometimes they operate on a life-size scale, other times their scale has been altered, which confuses our perception of space, or even our spatial orientation, especially when sometimes double spaces are created. The photographs by Sabine Hornig play two important roles in her work: either they are an element that is included in three-dimensional works, with the aim to create a trompe l’œil effect, or they are used as photographs in its stricter sense. In that case the subjects are almost always windows, façades of glass building or abandoned shop windows. In the ‘instrumental’ use of photographic images when applied the composition of her architectural sculptures, the images are sometimes ‘fitted’ between glass planes. This creates different perceptions of space, causing a complexity in the composition that sometimes makes it difficult for the viewer to differentiate between real space and the virtual/photographic space. In those cases, the use of photography becomes a spatial activity, more than simply using an image as such, and therefore integrating sculptural issues that are relevant for Hornig. When photographic images are used in isolation, the subject matter the artist focuses on is that of glass surfaces, thus challenging the viewer in their perception of reflection and transparency. These images are often increased in scale, generating an effect of ‘real’ presence of visual elements, which in the image simply appear as reflection, but that are enhanced by the reflection added by the photographic image having been framed in Plexiglas. The viewers see themselves among the reflections in the image and those from the room, and find themselves in a strange limbo between reality and fiction. This is the case of Weiber Vorhang III (2006), in which the reflection from the street, the vision of what is beyond the glass surface, and the reflection of the exhibition space generate a complex game. This is in turn highlighted by the stickers in the photographed glass, which are proof of its reality but also constitute dubious elements as they may look like they were later placed in the Plexiglas surface covering the image. Hornig had her first large overview exhibition at the Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon in 2005.

Delﬁm Sardo

Selected bibliography Sabine Hornig, Landscape Negative, Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art/Barbara Thumm, Lisbon/Berlin, 2008. Sabine Hornig. Der Zweite Raum, Hatje Cantz, Ostﬁldern, 2006.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 180 23/12/08 0:12:15 180 BESART / SABINE HORNIG 181 BESART / SABINE HORNIG

Sabine Hornig

Delﬁm Sardo

Selected bibliography Sabine Hornig, Landscape Negative, Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art/Barbara Thumm, Lisbon/Berlin, 2008. Sabine Hornig. Der Zweite Raum, Hatje Cantz, Ostﬁldern, 2006.

Weiber Vorhang III, 2006 Chromogenic Process (C-Print), mounted on Plexiglas · Edition 6/6

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 180 23/12/08 0:12:15 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 181 23/12/08 0:12:22 182 BESART / CRAIGIE HORSFIELD

Craigie Horsﬁeld

‘Looking into a photograph is discovering the absence, the other place that 1 All quotes from Relation, Centro makes attention turn on itself, becoming a reverie and reflection.’1 This sentence de Arte Moderna/Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, 2006. by Craigie Horsfield (1949, Cambridge, United Kingdom) is a summary of the particularity of his work. To call him a photographer is correct but it’s not all. This is work that exceeds the creation of images, as it also includes thought (he is the author of extensive and complex reflexive texts on his subjects and the tensions present in the contemporary world) and the use of resources made available by his artistic vocabulary: video, audio and always an intense and almost amorous relation with his subjects. The reverie mentioned by Horsfield is related to the nature of the creative act, and reflection is the premise of his entire activity: art cannot exist without reflection, without thought. The relational aspect implied by the whole aesthetic experience is critical for the artist. Not only because it designates the world as Man knows it – ‘the world is known through relations’, according to the artist – but also because it presents an artistic methodology. If it is true that art tends to be understood as ‘non-meth- odological’ and ‘non-systematic’, to Horsfield the construction of a thought on the limits and possibilities of his subject is essential for defining the particular nature of each gesture. The reflexive and visual movement made by the artist finds in the strength of human intelligence its scope and that permeates the artistic work. The relation is also social and cognitive and results in the birth (which is also a rupture with concepts, words) of objects that are called photography. Language is often powerless in stating what is necessary, but it is always a possible language. It is an essential element according to the artist: ‘art can only be understood through the language we are all dedicated to’. It seems language is the mediation that allows for an image to stop being a mere representation of the world and to become a significant image. If, as Horsfield states, ‘the photographic image lies between the thing and the saying’, it means that the saying of the image is the moment it gains awareness and is born as a symbolic act. The metaphor of language is extremely powerful. But Horsfield seems to be doomed to photography: ‘throughout my life, I have assumed that the language I use is corrupt. It cannot be the holder of absolute truth. We do not live with this type of certainty. However, this language is all that I have.’ This is not a complaint but rather the confirmation of the limits inherent to all expressive means: there is always a barrier that cannot be crossed – the barrier of the unspeakable, of what cannot be photographed, of the invisible.

Nuno Crespo

Selected bibliography Craigie Horsﬁeld: Napoli Conversations, Electa, Naples, 2008. La Ciutat de la Gent, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1997. Craigie Horsﬁeld. A Discussion with Jean-Francois Chevrier and James Lingwood, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 1991.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 182 23/12/08 0:12:22 182 BESART / CRAIGIE HORSFIELD 183 BESART / CRAIGIE HORSFIELD

Craigie Horsﬁeld

Nuno Crespo

Moll de Sant Bertain, Zona Franca, Barcelona, March 1996, 1996 Gelatin silver print · 140 x 140 cm · Unique print Dark Bottles One Blue, 2006 Inkjet prints (Dry Print Process) · 128 x 112 cm · Unique print

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 182 23/12/08 0:12:22 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 183 23/12/08 0:12:27 184 BESART / ZHANG HUAN

Zhang Huan

Chinese artist and performer Zhang Huan (1965, An Yang, China) uses performance as his preferred means of artistic expression, being a pioneer in the use of performative practices in contemporary China. Following the rising interest for contemporary Chinese art in the West, Zhang Huan has gained more visibility within the last decade. With a degree in painting from Henan University, Zhang Huan decided to move to Beijing in 1991, where he deviated from the realm of conventional media, preferring an artistic practice consolidated in the more experimental character of performance. He decided to leave China for New York in 1998, where he was invited to show his work in important institutions on the international art scene. Nowadays he is considered one of the most relevant contemporary Chinese artists. He currently lives in Shanghai. The series of nine images of Shanghai Family Tree (2001), form an example of Huan’s performative work, containing all the essential characteristics of his artistic practice: the inspiration by body art, references to traditional Chinese culture and actions inspired by Eastern concepts and rituals, documented in a narrative photographic series. The work is based on covering the face with three calligraphic characters that consist of the recording of a Shanghai family tree. In parallel to the strong symbolic weight of this action, aiming at questioning the limits of individuality in relation to a group, along with our human fragility in current society, this work is also peculiar because of its close relationship with one of his most well-known series, Family Tree (2001), also consisting of 9 photographs, in which the artist performed a similar intervention. Zhang Huan has participated in exhibitions at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and PS1 in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Kunstmuseum Bern as well as the biennials of Venice, Lyon and Gwangju. In 2007, the Fundación Telefónica in Madrid organised an retrospective of his work within the scope of PhotoEspaña, Festival Internacional de Fotografía y Artes Visuales.

Sandra Vieira Jürgens

Selected bibliography Zhang Huan, PhotoEspaña and Foundación Telefónica, Madrid, 2007. Melissa Chiu, Zhang Huan: altered states, Charta/Asia Society, Milan/New York, 2007. Yilmaz Dziewior, Zhang Huan, Hatje Cantz, Ostﬁldern, 2003.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 184 23/12/08 0:12:27 184 BESART / ZHANG HUAN 185 BESART / ZHANG HUAN

Zhang Huan

Sandra Vieira Jürgens

Shanghai Family Tree, 2001 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 9 x (50.8 x 76.2 cm) · Edition 15/25

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 184 23/12/08 0:12:27 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 185 23/12/08 0:12:29 186 BESART / ZHANG HUAN

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 186 23/12/08 0:12:31 186 BESART / ZHANG HUAN 187 BESART / ZHANG HUAN

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 186 23/12/08 0:12:31 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 187 23/12/08 0:12:32 188 BESART / AXEL HÜTTE

Axel Hütte

A disciple of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Axel Hütte (1951, Essen, Germany) deals with problems related to our comprehension of landscape and architecture. His landscapes, their locations identified by their titles, are simultaneously accurate and abstract as they do not contain easily identifiable visual references. They come across as raw, pre-historical and are characterised by neutrality. Emptied of narrative sense, it is not possible to find any signs of human action in them. The photographer travels far to find the perfect setting for his images and waits for the ideal lighting and for favourable weather conditions. Therefore, the infinitesimally small gesture of the actual shot is opposed to the duration of the expedition and the long wait at each location. As a result Hütte shows us stripped landscapes favourable to meditation and waiting, implicit in the process. His images have been compared to Romantic paintings, particularly to the evocation of the nostalgic and lonely landscapes from Caspar David Friedrich. Even when the subject is the urban landscape, as in the series As Dark As Light (2001), Hütte ex- amines it with the same level of bareness, projecting a distant view, somewhere between anonymity and a slight feeling of familiarity. Hütte works with large formats, as in the diptych Djupavatnet, Diptychoc, Norway (2000). It integrates the series North/South, comprised of images from Iceland, Norway, Alaska, Greenland, Germany, America and South Africa. In a con- trasting dialogue, the exotic marshes and the opulence of the tropical forest exist side by side with inhospitable and snow-covered surfaces and freezing glaciers. Axel Hütte won the Hermann Claasen Prize in 1983. In 2004 the Museu Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid organised a retrospective of the artist’s work.

Luísa Especial

Selected bibliography Axel Hütte. North/South, Henie Onstad Art Centre, Hovikodden, 2006. Axel Hütte. As Dark as Light, Schirmer/Mosel, Munich, 2001. Axel Hütte. Fecit, Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Richter Verlag, Düsseldorf, 2000. Axel Hütte. Landscape. The Trace of the Sublime, Keber, Bielefeld, 1998.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 188 23/12/08 0:12:32 188 BESART / AXEL HÜTTE 189 BESART / AXEL HÜTTE

Axel Hütte

Luísa Especial

Djupavatnet, Diptychoc, Norway, 2000 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) mounted on Diasec · 2 x (187 x 147) cm · Edition 3/4

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 188 23/12/08 0:12:32 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 189 23/12/08 0:12:40 190 BESART / SARAH JONES

Sarah Jones

Sarah Jones (1959, London, United Kingdom) has been exhibiting since 1987. During the 1990s her work assumed a thematic vocation that would later become transversal and that is associated with the symbolic deconstruction of the natural field of psychoanalysis. Couches in consulting rooms, systematically catalogued in photographs of a similar compositional geometry – but with a changeable chro- matic incidence – are implicit portraits that forebode a later series developed in domestic spaces occupied by bored teenagers. Human presence goes from being absent in consulting rooms to continuous appearance in living or dining rooms of Victorian mansions belonging to the growing British bourgeoisie. Jones’s rooms capture codified objects rigorously associated and ritually displayed on or around immaculately polished tables. The heterogeneous association of the rehearsed mementos becomes double still lifes (because they are reflected) which, unemotional in their stillness and symmetry, evoke the space traditionally considered as manifestations of patriarchal authority and the construction of social status. The recurrence of the subject and the stereotyped choreography of its suspended gestures contribute to creating the fictional ten- sion that the images might carry. The structural formalism, the frontal perspective, the rigorous framing, the intense colour palette, the plainness of the layers and the natural scale (a square) are all technical characteristics of Sarah Jones’s disciplined eye, whether it focuses on girls or hair, trees or roses. Her key task is to eternalise things that grow, more or less wildly, in places that are hostile to their youthful conditions: places of submission and exclusion. Sarah Jones’s work was recently part of several group exhibitions, including Street & Studio: An Urban History of Photography (Tate Modern, London, 2008) and The Society of London Ladies (Dispari & Dispari Project, Reggio Emilia, Italy, 2008). Sarah Jones: Photographs (National Media Museum, Bradford, United Kingdom, 2007) was her most recent solo exhibition in an institutional space.

Lígia Afonso

Selected bibliography Street & Studio: An Urban History of Photography, Tate, London, 2008. Sarah Jones, ‘Sarah Jones on August Sander, Thomas Ruff and Walker Evans’, in TATEetc, London, Summer 2008.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 190 23/12/08 0:12:40 190 BESART / SARAH JONES 191 BESART / SARAH JONES

Sarah Jones

Lígia Afonso

The Dining Room Table (Mulberry Lodge) II, 1998 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) mounted on aluminium · 150 x 150 cm · Edition 1/3 The Park (II), 2002 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) mounted on aluminium · 130 x 170 cm · Edition of 3/5 + 1 AP

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 190 23/12/08 0:12:40 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 191 23/12/08 0:12:43 192 BESART / THOMAS JOSHUA COOPER

Thomas Joshua Cooper

Thomas Joshua Cooper (1946, San Francisco, CA, USA) has systematically been exhibiting his work in several international galleries and institutions since the 1960s. Simultaneous to his ongoing artistic practice, Joshua Cooper has also to a large extent developed his teaching (he founded the department of Photography of the Glasgow School of Art) and theoretical activities (together with Paul Hill, he gathered a series of interviews with photographers in Dialogue with Photography, 1979). In 2005 his practice was awarded the Creative Scotland Award. Joshua Cooper’s work is frequently included in the context of the British artists who exploited the notion of landscape in the 1960s (what would later become known as land art), in which artists would predominantly bypass the representation of the landscape by using other formal solutions. Hamish Fulton, Andy Goldsworthy or Richard Long for instance would walk and later work with the natural elements gathered during their explorations of inhospitable, deserted and unsurpassable landscapes. Cooper is also a nomadic artist, moving towards precisely determined locations and almost always including geographical borders. With a clearly outlined itinerary, the artist seeks to find the significant locations for his own mapping, using only traditional photography (Joshua Cooper works with a large-format manual camera and final proofs are produced using nineteenth-century means), forcing the artist to live in these isolated and extreme places for several days. His photographs Cabo da Roca (1994), from the series The World’s Edge, Porto Moniz, Madeira (2003) and The Azores, Portugal (2004), all translate the meditative side of his experiences and the philosophical will to map finisterrae.

Maria do Mar Fazenda

Selected bibliography Point of No Return, Haunch of Venison, London, 2004. Dialogue with Photography: Interviews by Paul Hill and Thomas Cooper, Dewi Lewis Publishing, Stockport, 1998. A Simples Contagem das Ondas, Centro de Arte Moderna/Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, 1994.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 192 23/12/08 0:12:43 192 BESART / THOMAS JOSHUA COOPER 193 BESART / THOMAS JOSHUA COOPER

Thomas Joshua Cooper

Maria do Mar Fazenda

Cabo da Roca, Portugal, 1994 Gelatin silver print · 102 x 137 cm · Edition 3/3 Porto Moniz, Madeira, 2003 Gelatin silver print · 102 x 137 cm · Edition 3/3 The Azores, Portugal, 2004 Gelatin silver print · 102 x 137 cm · Edition 2/3

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 192 23/12/08 0:12:43 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 193 23/12/08 0:14:17 194 BESART / ISAAC JULIEN

Isaac Julien

His films and installations could be viewed in a cinema, however, Isaac Julien (1960, London, United Kingdom) states that the proper context for his work is the museum and gallery space, free from constraints external to the art world. The artist often uses photographs with his complex and magnificent multi-screen installations. These combine documentary and fiction and inscribe the effects of globalisation on man’s movement around the world. Together with Fantôme Afrique (2005), the series True North (2004) and Western Union (2007) create a trilogy of audio-visual film installations. The themes of travelling and sublime landscapes are two common subjects in the two last series. In True North, Julien rehabilitates the memory of Matthew Henson, an afro-American who accompanied Robert Peary in his expedition to the North Pole. His story is not remembered – contrary to what happened with his travelling mate – although his personal records remain. Both the film and the photographs (stills derived from the film) contemplate on extraordinary glacier landscapes and associate with the technically expert images a high poetic density. The series Western Union deals with illegal immigration in the Mediterranean region, the sole purpose of which is to escape hunger and war. True North and Western Union are, in their aim at granting visibility to marginal issues and re- interpreting the role of the black man in post-colonial culture, closely connected. Isaac Julien founded Sankofa Film (1983), Video Collective (1992) and Normal Films (1999). In 2005 the Centre Pompidou staged a solo exhibition of the artist’s work. Julien was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001, and was awarded the MIT Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts (2001) and the Frameline Lifetime Achievement Award (2002).

Luísa Especial

Selected bibliography Isaac Julien. True North Fantôme Afrique, Kestner Gesellschaft/Hatje Cantz, Hannover/ Ostﬁldern, 2006. Isaac Julien, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2005. Chris Darke, Kobena Mercer, Isaac Julien, Ellipsis, London, 2001. The Film Art of Isaac Julien, Center for Curatorial Studies/Bard College, New York, 2000.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 194 23/12/08 0:14:17 194 BESART / ISAAC JULIEN 195 BESART / ISAAC JULIEN

Isaac Julien

Luísa Especial

True North Series, Ice Project Work No. 8, 2007 Transparency (Duratrans) by chromogenic process mounted on lightbox · 123 x 247 x 7 cm · Edition 1/6 + 1 AP

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 194 23/12/08 0:14:17 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 195 23/12/08 0:14:18 196 BESART / ISAAC JULIEN

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 196 23/12/08 0:14:19 196 BESART / ISAAC JULIEN 197 BESART / ISAAC JULIEN

Western Union Series No. 2 (Flight Towards Other Destinies 1), 2007 Transparency (Duratrans) by chromogenic process mounted on lightbox · 120 x 244 x 7 cm · Edition 5/6

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 196 23/12/08 0:14:19 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 197 23/12/08 0:14:20 198 BESART / AINO KANNISTOA

Aino Kannisto

Throughout the last decade, Finish photography reached a particular highlight with artists such as Marjaana Kella, Esko Mänikkö and, more recently, Elina Brotherus. Aino Kannisto (1973, Espoo, Finland) is part of a younger generation, with exhibitions in 2008 at the 2nd Havre Art Biennial and in several other countries such as Spain, Germany and Sweden. Characterised by an impressive technical quality, the Finish school takes the photographic space as an imitation of the world head on, organised in such as way as to draw out a thematic, symbolic or psychological specificity. Aino Kannisto photographs herself in contradictory situations which negate the hypothesis of them being documentary, or even self-portraits. She creates a character that we follow in introspective or casual daily-life situations. However, she seems to be aware not so much of the fact that she is the subject of a photograph, but of the position she takes ‘inside’ the image: a prepared surprise in a hotel hall or cheerfulness in a decrepit bathroom, or even a contained arrogance in a bourgeois living room... The Finish artist creates an amoebic feminine universe embodied by her, grounded in the theatricality of the images. Each object, each scene, has a role as strictly determined as the character. The image opens up a world that is intui- tively identified by the viewer. The different situations show a universe of affection, of melancholy, abandonment, despair, fatigue, boredom... The artist plays with the suggestion of a fiction and the possibility of the viewer manipulating such fiction like an absent movie editor. But the photographs by Aino Kannisto do not have a ‘before’ or ‘after’. The fiction is suspended, in the hands of the viewer, perverting their ever-present voyeuristic call. Exploring the open narrative of the image, contained in a cinematographic expectation, Aino Kannisto creates a periscope with her own body. Untitled (Black Mirror) (2005), Untitled (Red Kitchen) (2004) and Untitled (White Sliding Doors) (2004) are examples. The feminine body is often cut off, covered, distorted, hidden by doors, walls and sometimes by framing. The subject oscillates between fictional reality and an untouchable body, sometimes through a reflection, sometimes through matter (or its absence), submerged in the world’s fabric.

Joana Neves

Selected bibliography Aino Kannisto, Transit Art Space, Skansekaien, Stavanger, 2006. Aino Kannisto, Galeria Colón XVI, Bilbao, 2006.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 198 23/12/08 0:14:20 198 BESART / AINO KANNISTOA 199 BESART / AINO KANNISTOA

Aino Kannisto

Joana Neves

Selected bibliography Aino Kannisto, Transit Art Space, Skansekaien, Stavanger, 2006. Aino Kannisto, Galeria Colón XVI, Bilbao, 2006.

Untitled (Red Kitchen), 2004 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) mounted on aluminium · 90 x 117 cm · Edition 5/6 Untitled (Black Mirror), 2005 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) mounted on aluminium · 90 x 110 cm · Edition 6/6 Untitled (White Sliding Glass Doors), 2004 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) mounted on aluminium · 90 x 116 cm · Edition 4/6

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 198 23/12/08 0:14:20 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 199 23/12/08 0:14:25 200 BESART / PERTTI KEKARAINEN

Pertti Kekarainen

The work of Pertti Kekarainen (1965, Oulu, Finland) subjects photography to a pictorial and in some way sculptural sensitivity. After initially exploring installations and readymades, the artist opted for photography in 1993. Since then he has exhibited in several countries, taking part in exhibitions at the Kulturhus, in Stockholm, the Prague Biennial and the Pontevedra Biennial, to mention a few. Photography is a pretext for overlapping techniques and forms, creating spaces that show both the real dimension and their possible distortion – or improvement – through memory or a perception sensitive to modulation. As such, an escape point, a corner, a wall, a living room, are reported rather than portrayed. An example is the series Tila, to which the image shown here belongs. Tila (Passage V) (2007) shows countless doors and windows or spaces between two people – but this image space is obscured by small auras, light points, forms that rather than continuing the evident geometry of the space, open it out onto the world. The question raised here touches that world, asking: to what nature does it belong? What does it show? In Finish, the word ‘Tila’, according to those that understand it, has different meanings: place, space, location, but both in a literal and in a symbolic sense. However, it also means a state of mind or of grace. By giving a set of images that title, produced over a period of approximately two years, Kekarainen associates the realistic dimension of the image (recreated by the relevant scale of the photographs) to another dimension, fathomless and more mental, placing a veil over it and artiﬁcially expanding its space. Playing with the slight blurriness of the look, the Finish artist brings us to the surface of an image into which we are expected to dive. His training as a painter is revealed through the use of small convex glasses causing anamorphous phenomena. He invokes painting and its different optic techniques, playing hide and seek with the representation of the world, but also with the position of the painter and the viewer regarding the painting. Therefore, like the previous one, the monochromes in the Density (1995-2002) series, also developed over several years, uses the objectivity of colour and surface to bind us both to the vertiginous fabric of the real world and to the more opaque and absorbing world of the image-screen.

Joana Neves

Selected bibliography Pertti Kekarainen: Density Tila Series, Photology, Milan, 2006. Pertti Kekarainen: Site 1, NYKY, Helsinki, 1999.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 200 23/12/08 0:14:25 200 BESART / PERTTI KEKARAINEN 201 BESART / PERTTI KEKARAINEN

Pertti Kekarainen

Joana Neves

Selected bibliography Pertti Kekarainen: Density Tila Series, Photology, Milan, 2006. Pertti Kekarainen: Site 1, NYKY, Helsinki, 1999.

Tila (Passage V), 2007 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 195 x 125 cm · Edition 2/5

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 200 23/12/08 0:14:25 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 201 23/12/08 0:14:26 202 BESART / JOSEF KOUDELKA

Josef Koudelka

People say that Josef Koudelka (1938, Boskovice, Czech Republic) has a certain nostalgia for the small Czech village with four hundred inhabitants, in which he was born. He started to take photographs there before attending the Technical University of Prague to become an engineer. In 1961 he had his first photographic exhibition, Divadlo Semafor. In 1967 he became a full-time photographer, abandoning engineering and dedicating himself to a project on gipsies in Romania. When he returned to Czechoslovakia, in August 1968 during the Prague Spring, Koudelka took pictures of the capital being invaded by the soviet tanks, later sending them anonymously to Magnum to be published in the Sunday Times Magazine. The images ran across the world and the following year Koudelka, the anonymous ‘Photographer from Prague’, won the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award, awarded by the National Press Photographers Association, USA . He had already won an award in his own country, awarded by the Union of Czech Artists in 1967, and would continue to accumulate awards throughout his life. In 1970 he moved to England where he had two exhibitions, Gypsies (1975), which is also the title of his first book, and Exiles (1988). Truly international, Koudelka’s work is present in collections throughout the world. Whether in his images of the simultaneously happy and tragic Gipsy world or his fantastic capacity to emphasise the passing of man through the harshest territories, all his work points out the stubborn poetry of the human weakness that eventually ends in death and becomes mixed with the cloudy and grey skies or the furrows he leaves in the mud, evidencing the great persistence of living. But a statement is also present when a landscape seems to have forgotten its presence but not its mystery. The two landscape photographs here, in which dynamic elements of nature (sand and sea) challenge man, specifically fit into the most recent update of this concept.

Maria do Carmo Serén

Selected bibliography Invasion Prague 68, Aperture, New York, 2008. Chaos, Phaidon, London, 2008. Limestone, Groupe Lhoist, Paris, 2001. Cerny Trojúhelnik – Podkrusnohorí Fotograﬁe: 1990-1994, Správa Prazskeho, Prague, 1994. Gypsies, Aperture, New York, 1975.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 202 23/12/08 0:14:26 202 BESART / JOSEF KOUDELKA 203 BESART / JOSEF KOUDELKA

Josef Koudelka

Maria do Carmo Serén

Near Guincho Beach, 2004 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) · 67 x 165 cm · © the artist / Magnum Photos

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 202 23/12/08 0:14:26 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 203 23/12/08 0:14:28 204 BESART / JOSEF KOUDELKA

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 204 23/12/08 0:14:30 204 BESART / JOSEF KOUDELKA 205 BESART / JOSEF KOUDELKA

Granja, 2004 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) · 67 x 165 cm · © the artist / Magnum Photos

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 204 23/12/08 0:14:30 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 205 23/12/08 0:14:31 206 BESART / BARBARA KRUGER

Barbara Kruger

From Barbara Kruger’s (1945, Newark, NJ, USA) point of view, photography must obscure its own means, going for an appropriationist logic that deliberately deletes any authorial value, and that emphasises the interchangeable ﬂow of signs within contemporary societies. This results in an exchange of values and meanings produced through small and subtle interventions, mainly of a linguistic nature, inverting the original meaning that is almost always related to a common message that has become a stereotype, and that is often sexist. The feminist criticism of the perpetuation of male power in the production of meaning therefore remains a constant subject in her work as she undertakes an in-depth analysis of power by closely following Roland Barthes’ theory that suggests the death of the author, or the valuation of political interpretations to photographic images outlined by Susan Sontag. Based on allegoric appropriationist methods, in works such as Untitled (Let Go) (2004), Kruger seeks to create conditions for overcoming our collective hyp- nosis by developing a great visual impact, using photo editing and words that invert their original meaning. The strategy for revealing or making transparent the oppressive mediation leads Barbara Kruger, in her own words, to denounce ‘the control the plurality of signs circulating within society exercises over reality.’ The semiotic analytical tradition and the entire post-structuralistic mode of thinking therefore form an essential theoretical reference for her work. By using visual strategies derived from her own professional experience in advertising, Barbara Kruger creates a ﬁerce and disarming comment on the manipulation exercised through the visual mediation of our oppressing contemporaneity. The artist uses the same methods, that is, graphic manipulation, to completely sub- vert the ‘fair’ intentions of the original message. Whether the recipients of these works are men or women, they will quickly acknowledge the visual trap that has structured them, due to the immediate familiarity of the new images in relation to the advertisement images. The work explores a contradictory game between text and image, words and visual elements, forcing the observer to raise questions about emblematic and disruptive issues of our times, such as abortion, religious intolerance, racism, domestic violence, sex or freedom of speech. With her work Kruger builds a critical dimension of counter-speech and de- centralisation of meaning as a more effective manner of undermining the prevail- ing codes and pointing out a subtle disappearance of the protagonist.

David Santos

Selected bibliography Barbara Kruger. Desire Exists When Pleasure is Absent, Kerber, Bieleﬁeld, 2007. Twelve, Tramway, London, 2006. Barbara Kruger. Thinking of You, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1999. Barbara Kruger, Phil Mariani (eds.), Remaking History (Discussions in Contemporary Culture, No. 4), New Press, New York, 1998. Barbara Kruger, Remote Control: Power, Culture, and the World of Appearances, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1994.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 206 23/12/08 0:14:31 206 BESART / BARBARA KRUGER 207 BESART / BARBARA KRUGER

Barbara Kruger

David Santos

Untitled (Let Go), 2004 Photographic and typographic print · 165.1 x 241.3 cm · Edition 3/5

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 206 23/12/08 0:14:31 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 207 23/12/08 0:14:33 208 BESART / LOUISE LAWLER

Louise Lawler

Louise Lawler’s (1947, New York, NY, USA) practice proposes a reﬂection on the social circuits of works of art. Her own œuvre is directly related to individual works by other artists, which she photographs in different presentation contexts: while exhibited in a museum, during installation and de-installation, in storage or at the homes of private collectors. In her collaboration with Douglas Crimp for the book On the Museum´s Ruins, Lawler’s photographic work runs parallel to the author’s text: they both see the work of art as being inevitably conditioned by the institutional frame. In What Else Could I Do, the artist photographed Claes Oldenburg’s sculpture Soft Light Switches ’Ghost’ Version, 1963. The piece is presented as in any exhibition, in a totally sterile environment. Conversely, in White Gloves, similarly to what she has done with many other works, the artist chooses an out-of-centre perspective on the work of art with the purpose of granting priority to the context. Here Lawler refers to the protection of the work and the package materials used for transportation, backstage of a large museum institution. It is the de- installation phase of the temporary exhibition by Gerhard Richter, at Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2002, entitled Forty Years of Painting. Richter’s painting belongs to the series 48 Portraits (1971-72) and the portrayed character is James Franck, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1925. The posthumous portraits of these forty-eight men, dressed in black suits, acquire an intentional ideologi- cal neutrality, levelling them as if they were the images from an encyclopaedia. In Lawler’s photographs, in an almost illegible typeface and immediately above the portrait, there is a written message requesting the careful handling of the piece and the care for its integrity. The clarity of Ritcher’s work in the image gives the impression of being enveloped by an aura whereas all that surrounds it remains dark and dubious.

Luísa Especial

Selected bibliography Twice Untitled and Other Pictures (Looking Back): Louise Lawler, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006. Louise Lawler and Others, Hatje Cantz, Ostﬁldern, 2004. An Arrangement of Pictures, Assouline, New York, 2000. Louise Lawler: For Sale, Reihe Cantz, Ostﬁldern, 1994. Douglas Crimp, On the Museum´s Ruins, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 208 23/12/08 0:14:33 208 BESART / LOUISE LAWLER 209 BESART / LOUISE LAWLER

Louise Lawler

Luísa Especial

White Gloves, 2002/2004 Silver Dye Bleach Print (Ilfochrome) mounted on aluminium box · 73.66 x 69.21 cm · Edition 1/5 What Else Could I Do (Oldenburg), 1994-1995 Silver Dye Bleach Print (Ilfochrome) mounted on aluminium box · 99 x 99 cm · Edition 1/5

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 208 23/12/08 0:14:33 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 209 23/12/08 0:16:16 210 BESART / NIKKI S. LEE

Nikki S. Lee

Nikki S. Lee’s (1970, Kye-Chang, South Korea) work has been exhibited in institutions worldwide including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the San Francisco Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, in Kansas City. Her photographs are included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum or the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. In her series titled Projects (1997-2001), the first project in her career, Lee produced snapshots in which she poses with various social and ethnic groups, assuming their identity. From skateboarder to old lady, Korean student to white trash girl, Lee reveals chameleonic qualities in relation to the environment that surrounds her. In doing so the artist represents a concept of identity that is tran- sient, always related to a context, whether social or cultural, in which a notion of individuality is difficult to anchor. This project would lead to Parts (2002-2005) in which the artist photographs herself in idyllic situations that are typical for the dating culture, such as a cou- ple in the car, out shopping or in a swimming pool. However, in these shots she always keeps her ‘partner’ carefully on the fringes of the image frame, without letting him be seen properly. Unlike Projects, Parts is carefully staged with a fairytale-like aesthetics, therefore remaining as a testimonial that the sine qua non condition for romantic love is the absence of the other half. In 2006 Lee started working as a cinematographer with the film A.K.A. Nikki S. Lee, in which she appears with the double personality of student and socialite, documenting her experiences of impersonating both characters and analysing how each of us always resembles more the environment we are in than actually ourselves.

Ana Pinto

Selected bibliography Parts, Hatje Cantz, Ostﬁldern, 2005. Russell Ferguson, Gilbert Vicario, Projects, Hatje Cantz, Ostﬁldern, 2001.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 210 23/12/08 0:16:16 210 BESART / NIKKI S. LEE 211 BESART / NIKKI S. LEE

Nikki S. Lee

Ana Pinto

Selected bibliography Parts, Hatje Cantz, Ostﬁldern, 2005. Russell Ferguson, Gilbert Vicario, Projects, Hatje Cantz, Ostﬁldern, 2001.

The Exotic Dancers Project (31), 2000 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 56.51 x 74.29 cm · Edition 5/5

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 210 23/12/08 0:16:16 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 211 23/12/08 0:16:18 212 BESART / NIKKI S. LEE

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 212 23/12/08 0:16:27 212 BESART / NIKKI S. LEE 213 BESART / NIKKI S. LEE

The Punk Project (7), 1997 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 74.29 x 56.51 cm · Edition 5/5 The Schoolgirls Project (4), 2000 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 74.29 x 56.51 cm · Edition 1/5 The Ohio Project (10), 1999 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 56.51 x 74.29 cm · Edition 1/5 The Hispanic Project (16), 1998 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 56.51 x 74.29 cm · Edition 3/5 The Lesbian Project (3), 1997 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 56.51 x 74.29 cm · Edition 4/5 The Seniors Project (19), 1999 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 56.51 x 74.29 cm · Edition 1/5 The Skateboarders Project (7), 2000 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 74.29 x 56.51 cm · Edition 5/5

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 212 23/12/08 0:16:27 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 213 23/12/08 0:16:31 214 BESART / PEDRO LETRIA

Pedro Letria

The works of Pedro Letria (1965, Lisbon, Portugal) reveal the use of photography as an epistemological tool. In a certain way the images produced by Letria are the result of a disturbing ‘need to know’: they are simultaneously the reason and the means through which the author develops processes of engagement with the social, moral and cultural structures that manifest themselves in all times and all places in different manners. Whether within the scope of a commissioned work or within the context of a project initiated by himself, all Letria’s activities seem to be devoted to the application of a gaze that dwells upon the things in the world, and that seeks in them the visual signs that suggest, not exactly the truth, but its character within the singular quality of its appearance. Pedro Letria’s works shown here, created during his travels to relatively remote places, reveal how the construction of his images serves this particular observation ethics. Through the use of a wide depth of field, a static composition and often a proximity to the object, we find no subterfuge that complicates the clear identification of the composing elements in these photographs. In Letria’s pictures everything is carefully made visible, including our gaze, here linked with the gaze of those discovering and negotiating expectations in light of the iconological diversity that the world offers us. Between 1981 and 1987 Letria studied at educational institutions as diverse as the Accademia di Belle Arte de Perugia (Italy) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (USA), where he obtained a BA in Fine Arts. His work has been published extensively in monographs, catalogues and other publications, in Portugal and abroad. Among the approximately fifty exhibitions in which he participated, the following solo exhibitions stand out: Mármore at gallery Assírio & Alvim (2007), Verbos at the Arquivo Municipal de Fotografia in Lisbon (2002), and Terraformada at the Sala Jorge Vieira – Parque das Nações in Lisbon (2000).

Bruno Marchand

Selected bibliography Mármore, Assírio & Alvim, Lisbon, 2007. Inventário, Assírio & Alvim, Lisbon, 2003. Verbos, Assírio & Alvim, Lisbon, 2003. Terraformada, Assírio & Alvim, Lisbon, 1999. E.N. 118, Edições Ópera, 1994.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 214 23/12/08 0:16:31 214 BESART / PEDRO LETRIA 215 BESART / PEDRO LETRIA

Pedro Letria

Bruno Marchand

Faixa de Gaza, 2005 Silver Dye Bleach Print (Ilfochrome) · 50 x 50 cm · Edition 1/5 Ilha de S. Jorge, 2005 Silver Dye Bleach Print (Ilfochrome) · 50 x 50 cm · Edition 1/5

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 214 23/12/08 0:16:31 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 215 23/12/08 0:16:39 216 BESART / PEDRO LETRIA

Pedro Letria Adega da Prisão de Pinheiro da Cruz, 2000 Silver Dye Bleach Print (Ilfochrome) · 50 x 50 cm · Edition 1/5 Sala de Recursos Humanos da Sodefor em Nioki, República Democrática do Congo, 2005 Silver Dye Bleach Print (Ilfochrome) · 50 x 50 cm · Edition 1/5

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 216 23/12/08 0:16:46 216 BESART / PEDRO LETRIA 217 BESART / SHERRIE LEVINE

Sherrie Levine

The work of Sherrie Levine (1947, Hazelton, PA, USA) corresponds with one of the most sophisticated exposures of the conventions concerning the photographic image: highlighting it operates within certain social and artistic institutions, taken for granted in a particular cultural and historical context. The artist is mainly known for her appropriation work in which she re-shoots works from other famous photographers, including Edward Weston, Walker Evans or Alexander Rodchenko. She does not manipulate the images, which at first sight cannot be distinguished from the ‘original’ – obviously there are differences but they are not fundamental. However, one wonders what the original represents when talking about a technology like photography that originates from mechanical reproduction. Levine’s work rejects any notions of self-expression, originality and subjectivity. Maybe that is why she is frequently mentioned when trying to define postmodernism. After all, she seems to carelessly associate herself with that mixture of attitude and method called postmodernism and which is often translated into irony, assumed plagiarism, a simple confiscation of texts and images. Considering that Levine has dedicated herself to the re-editing of images almost exclusively produced by men, her work has been understood as an attack on male preconceptions that dominate art history.

Ricardo Nicolau

Selected bibliography Sherrie Levine. Abstraction, The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, 2006. Sherrie Levine, Museum Morsbroich, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, 1998. Sherrie Levine. Newborn, Philadelphia Museum of Art/Portikus, Philadelphia/Frankfurt, 1993. Sherrie Levine, Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich, 1991. The Best of Both Worlds. Sherrie Levine’s After Walker Evans, Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, Northwestern University, Evanston, 1985.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 216 23/12/08 0:16:46 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 217 23/12/08 0:16:46 218 BESART / SHERRIE LEVINE

Pyramid of Skulls, 2002 Gelatin silver prints · 12 x (34.9 x 37.5 cm) · Edition 4/5

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 218 23/12/08 0:17:04 218 BESART / SHERRIE LEVINE 219 BESART / SHERRIE LEVINE

Pyramid of Skulls, 2002 Gelatin silver prints · 12 x (34.9 x 37.5 cm) · Edition 4/5

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 218 23/12/08 0:17:04 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 219 23/12/08 0:17:11 220 BESART / EURICO LINO DO VALE

Eurico Lino do Vale

Eurico Lino do Vale’s (1966, Oporto, Portugal) received his photography educa- tion in the 1990s at Ar.Co and the Royal College of Art (1994), followed by an MA in Photography from the Academy of Fine Arts in Dusseldorf in 1997. In essence his work became known around the turn of the century, especially in 2001, when his work gained visibility on the Portuguese photography scene, when he had two exhibitions of his most recent work. In that year he exhibited Nova Geração [new generation], in Centro de Arte Moderna / Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, a set of thirtheen portraits of children and teenagers, while he also had an exhibition, entitled Retratos e Outras Situações Encenadas [portraits and other staged situations] at Galeria Ara in Lisbon. Two of the works acquired for the BESart collection, Francisco (2001) and Teresa (2001) are part of the Nova Geração series, characterised by the expressive neutrality of the faces of those portrayed and their theatrical and artiﬁcial poses. These elements, together with the conventional use of black and white photography, may instigate readings that will consider the work in the context of the representation of the human image in classical arts or the tradition of portrait photography. Another possible analytical approach relates to current thinking about issues of standardisation, loss of identity, multiple identities and the personal characteristics of the individuals portrayed. The collection also contains Retrato de Sara Salvador [portrait of Sara Salvador] (2002), which is part of a series of portraits of women. Lino do Vale would later on abandon this approach because of the inability to capture the essence of the models’ expression. Other series of portraits followed: Retratos de Homens [portraits of men], shown at Galeria Luís Serpa Projectos in Lisbon, in 2003 and, Retratos dos Túmulos dos Reis de Portugal [portraits of Portuguese kings’ tombs], exhibited at the gallery Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporanêa in Lisbon, in 2007, for which the artist was nominated for the BES Photo 2007 award. Subsequently he exhibited the series entitled Retratos de Sombras [portraits of shadows], formed by a set of twenty four black and white photographs capturing those portrayed through their shadows, in Museu Colecção Berardo, in 2008.

Sandra Vieira Jürgens

Bibiograﬁa seleccionada David Barro, ‘Retratos Impossíveis’, in BES Photo 2007, Museu Colecção Berardo, Lisboa, 2008. José Sousa Machado, ‘Eu sou!’, Arte Ibérica, December 2001/January 2002, pp. 17-21. Eurico Lino do Vale. Nova Geração, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, 2001. Eurico Lino do Vale. Retratos e outras situações encenadas, Galeria Ara, Lisbon, 2001.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 220 23/12/08 0:17:12 220 BESART / EURICO LINO DO VALE 221 BESART / EURICO LINO DO VALE

Eurico Lino do Vale

Sandra Vieira Jürgens

Francisco, 2001 Gelatin silver print · 124 x 124 cm · Edition of 3 + AP Teresa, 2001 Gelatin silver print · 124 x 124 cm · Edition of 3 + AP Retrato de Sara Salvador, collection Retratos de Mulheres, 2002 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) · 128 x 128 cm · Edition 1/3 + AP

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 220 23/12/08 0:17:12 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 221 23/12/08 0:17:34 222 BESART / CARLOS LOBO

Carlos Lobo

Carlos Lobo (1974, Guimarães, Portugal) is a young photographer whose work is characterised by a streamlined and apparently neutral approach towards the captured and observed subjects, as if each image corresponds with an objective record of a contemplative act. Currently living in London, where he continued his studies in image and communication, he is mainly interested in how photography can change our perception of space, particularly by manipulating light, composition and framing, thus allowing for the construction or deconstruction of different spaces. Deeply influenced by cinema, not only on a formal level but also concerning the subjects in his work, Lobo creates images that require a stretching of time, both when they are captured and when they are experienced. His series Surfaces, with which participated in the competition for the BES Revelação 2005 award and that made him one of the four winners, is a good example. Images from several exhibition spaces were gathered: from the Museu Martins Sarmento, in his hometown, to the Royal Festival Hall and the Frieze Art Fair, in London. What surfaces does the artist select? Parts of furniture and ma- chinery, in virtually deserted areas, totally exempt from traces of the connection between their surroundings and the exhibition of works of art. The situations captured are displaced by the attention given to detail, to textures and to specific colours in a space, where a surface becomes in itself the subject of the photograph. Exhibited in 2006 at Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves in Oporto, and at Galeria Fuga pela Escada in Guimarães, this series benefits from the same uniform light we find in other works by Lobo as a way to not dramatise his subjects and to keep an image as descriptive as possible.

Lúcia Marques

Selected bibliography Bes Revelação’05, Fundação de Serralves, Oporto, 2005. Carlos Lobo. Venice, Galeria 24b, Oeiras, 2005.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 222 23/12/08 0:17:34 222 BESART / CARLOS LOBO 223 BESART / CARLOS LOBO

Carlos Lobo

Lúcia Marques

Selected bibliography Bes Revelação’05, Fundação de Serralves, Oporto, 2005. Carlos Lobo. Venice, Galeria 24b, Oeiras, 2005.

computer phone, from the series Surfaces, 2005 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) · 102.5 x 102.5 cm · Edition 1/4 + AP surface #3, from the series Surfaces, 2005 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) · 102.5 x 102.5 cm · Edition 1/4 + AP surface #12, from the series Surfaces, 2005 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) · 102.5 x 102.5 cm · Edition 1/4 + AP

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 222 23/12/08 0:17:34 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 223 23/12/08 0:17:38 224 BESART / ADELINA LOPES

Adelina Lopes

Adelina Lopes (1970, Braga, Portugal) has focused her work on the dissection of the object. As such, the artist cleans the image reducing it to what is indis- pensable for analysing it: the selected subject against a clear background. In fact, she presents the material with a sort of encyclopaedic classification. Such rigorous indexation is somewhat scientific, archaeological. And as in a collection of museum artefacts, the caption takes a decisive role. The object lexicon selected by Lopes is based on the word, the glass, the plate, the rock and the book. She manipulates meanings and significants as well as the sculptural importance of the language: when one considers a glass of water, one thinks of the glass and the water it contains. Lopes ironically shows that there are many other possibilities. The works now exhibited are part of the Itinerário Sobre as Formas (2005) series. In both, the physical absence of the glass is contradicted by its formal materiality: the amount of water inside the bottle or frozen into ice always corresponds to the amount of water inside the glass. The caption confirms that infor- mation. Joseph Kosuth questioned the nature of art and of the object in One and Three Chairs (1965). There he examined an object from a tautological point of view: the work is comprised of a chair, the photograph of that chair and the dictionary entry that indicates the literal meaning. Lopes explores the literalism of the object but expands it to reveal new values out of the conventional limits. From her most recent solo exhibitions, Distancia Crítica, in 2008, at Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Santiago de Compostela) stands out.

Luísa Especial

Selected bibliography Distancia Crítica, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, 2008. Filipa Oliveira, ‘Para uma estética dos objectos’, in L+Arte, August 2005. Sandra Vieira, ‘Adelina Lopes’, in Arte y Parte, 2005,.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 224 23/12/08 0:17:38 224 BESART / ADELINA LOPES 225 BESART / ADELINA LOPES

Adelina Lopes

Luísa Especial

Copo de água, 2005 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) · 120 x 120 cm · Edition 2/3 Um copo de água, 2005 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) · 120 x 120 cm · Edition 2/3

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 224 23/12/08 0:17:38 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 225 23/12/08 0:25:52 226 BESART / JOÃO LOURO

João Louro

Although João Louro (1963, Lisbon, Portugal) started his career with painting, he has also explored other areas: from sculpture to installation, video and photography. No matter what medium he uses, in all cases his main concern is the possibility of assessing the importance and the feasibility of images in a contemporary world already saturated with images. His artistic career is closely linked with political interventions, and therefore Louro’s work has always had a strongly felt presence in which aesthetic elements converge with issues of context and intervention. Photography plays centre stage in Louro’s practice, be it by absence, when language refers to images that are invisible to the viewer, or as a medium that documents a certain fictional intervention. The pictures included in this collection are examples of both strands. The work titled Um Pequeno Passo [a small step] (2001) refers to what Neil Armstrong said at dawn on 21 July 1969. In Louro’s work, such absolutely significant historical moments are transformed into images, almost as derisory logo- types. In this situation, the ‘small step’ is just a small step, however, maintaining valid the astronaut’s remark about the surface of the moon – ‘like powdered charcoal’. In the re-enactment (accomplished without doubt), a second pair of feet that also left a print represents an ironic distrust regarding the iconic value of the image. A distrust that also forms the basis in Louro’s Blind Images. The other work, Runaway Car Crashed #5 (1999) shows a partial image of a crashed car in which a set of dates corresponding to major disasters or huge successes of mankind are superimposed. The gap between the small biographic reference and the pointers to dramatic civil and political catastrophes is short and subtle. It is the gap between historic context and subjectivity. And it is in this gap that Louro’s work fits seamlessly.

Delﬁm Sardo

Selected bibliography João Louro, Blind Runner, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, 2004.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 226 23/12/08 0:25:52 226 BESART / JOÃO LOURO 227 BESART / JOÃO LOURO

João Louro

Delﬁm Sardo

Selected bibliography João Louro, Blind Runner, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, 2004.

Um Pequeno Passo, 2001 Gelatin silver print · 126.2 x 126.2 cm · Unique print + 1 AP Runaway Car Crashed #5, 1999 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 120 x 120 cm · Edition 1/4

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 226 23/12/08 0:25:52 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 227 23/12/08 0:25:55 228 BESART / VERA LUTTER

Vera Lutter

Vera Lutter (1960, Kaiserslautern, Germany) possesses an unmistakable German style, although she is mostly known in the USA, where she lives and has been working since she attended the New York School of Visual Arts. Lutter developed a style of paper ‘negatives’, based on a direct exposure technique on photographic paper using a light entrance identical to that used in the nineteenth-century camera obscura. Using this technique, the whole image appears as its own spectrum. Under a dark sky buildings are shown in various degrees of luminescence and, like an x-ray, the photograph captures the structures of the urban grid, the skeleton of the buildings. Due to the long exposure times required, from hours up to days, all traces of life have vanished from the image, no movement is recorded, the city is revealed in its ghostly condition. That ghostly condition is the ontological condition of the photograph itself, inscribed in the complete pano- ply of morbid or funereal practices residing at its source. The Victorian habit of taking post-mortem photographs, was intended to captures more than only the deceased’s apparent face. Every being has its own spectrum within, generating a ghostly emanation capable of existing beyond the body, turned visible through photography. The phenomenon of light refraction, the meeting point between technology and the supernatural, is the reason why the age of reason gave birth to the century of the irrational. In Battersea Power Station, XXIV: July 29, 2004 (2004), an actually familiar urban landscape exudes a disturbing strangeness, representing the charisma of Lutter’s work. It is likely that this charisma is the reason why she is the only contemporary artist to have been included in the collection of German and Austrian works of the Neue Galerie in New York. Her inclusion in this collection doesn’t stand on its own, as she has exhibited, among other venues, at the Kunsthalle Basel, New York’s Dia Center for the Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her photographs are included in collections of the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Ana Pinto

Selected bibliography Vera Lutter. Inside In, Walther König, Colónia, 2004. Blake Eskin, ‘On the Roof: Pepsi Degeneration’, in The New Yorker, 29 March 2004. Vera Lutter. Light in Transit, Holzwarth, Berlin, 2003. Peter Wollen, ‘Vera Lutter’, in Bomb, Autumn 2003.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 228 23/12/08 0:25:55 228 BESART / VERA LUTTER 229 BESART / VERA LUTTER

Vera Lutter

Ana Pinto

Battersea Power Station, XXIV: July 29, 2004, 2004 Gelatin silver negative, obtained trough camera obscura · 180.34 x 142.24 cm · Unique print

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 228 23/12/08 0:25:55 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 229 23/12/08 0:25:58 230 BESART / LORETTA LUX

Loretta Lux

Loretta Lux (1969, Dresden, Germany) is a disturbing persona, so meticulously thought through, from her image to her own name, much like the mysterious characters that populate her work. A painter essentially influenced by the history of painting itself (as well as 1950s American postcard illustrations), Lux has used photography as her main tool since 1999 The enigmatic children systematically portrayed in powerful images that renounce the large printing format in favour of a disturbing intimacy, are not thought of or felt about in a maternal way. On the contrary, they are strictly subjected to vintage clothing, geometric hair-dos, taxing poses and, later, to changes of eye colour, enlargements of heads or other individual physical features, by means of a subtle digital manipulation. Delicate mannerist extensions or satura- tion and focusing filters, while making them different from each other, also unite them as if they were all elements of a new mutant and potentially dominating genetic family. Cut out and juxtaposed in beguiling fairytale landscapes (painted or photographed during Lux’s travels), they assume, due to the collage contrast, the solitary protagonism of the rigorous structural compositions (paradoxically based on its luminous and strange formal inconsistency) and palette perfection (milky and pastel, between opacity and transparency). Simultaneously perverse and naïf, creepy and fascinating, monstrous and lov- ing; recognisable but alienated from their real appearance, these androgynous creatures do not represent themselves. Instead, they are ambiguous imaginary portraits that by proving the tragic irreversibility of children’s innocence also become a metaphor of a paradise lost. Lux was bestowed the Infinity Award for Art by the International Center of Photography (New York, 2005). Loretta Lux (Museo de Arte Contemporàneo de Monterrey, Mexico, 2008) and Retrospective (Fotomuseum Den Haag, The Netherlands, 2006.) were some of her most important recent exhibitions.

Lígia Afonso

Selected bibliography Loretta Lux, Imaginary Portraits, Aperture, New York, 2005. Roberta Smith, in The New York Times, 6 February 2004. Richard B. Woodward, ‘The Eerily Lovely Children of the Photoshop Generation’, in The New York Times, 29 February 2004.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 230 23/12/08 0:25:58 230 BESART / LORETTA LUX 231 BESART / LORETTA LUX

Loretta Lux

Lígia Afonso

Spring, 2001 Silver Dye Bleach Print (Ilfochrome) · 50 x 50 cm · Edition 7/7 Boy in a Blue Raincoat, 2001 Silver Dye Bleach Print (Ilfochrome) · 50 x 50 cm · Edition 7/7

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 230 23/12/08 0:25:58 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 231 23/12/08 0:26:03 232 BESART / RITA MAGALHÃES

Rita Magalhães

Throughout her career, Rita Magalhães (1974, Luanda, Angola) has developed photographic series in which her deep interest in the long tradition of art history shows through. A painting graduate from the Oporto School of Fine Arts, Rita Magalhães produced her first works within the scope of this discipline. Only later, with her first solo exhibition in 1999, her connection with photography became evident with her series Cidade [city] (1998/2001), comprised of black and white photos taken on the streets of Oporto. Two years later, she produced Amélia, a series that marked the beginning of a dialogue between photography and painting that would characterise her practice from the turn of the century on- wards. In this work, Magalhães resorts to the history of painting to stage images in which the woman is the main element in scenes from daily life, depicting, with the same stylistic treatment, actions and physical attitudes present in Vermeer’s seventeenth-century paintings. Using models dressed in clothes of that period (frequently belonging to her family) Magalhães shows us her taste for citing and updating in her photographs’ ‘universal moments’ of painting. Likewise, in 2006, Magalhães presented Time Still, a series in which she referenced the universe of Caravaggio’s works. The two photographs (both 2004) by Magalhães in the BESart collection, appear to directly follow in this line of enquiry by the artist, using the recreation of ancient times, punctuated by a pictorial sensitivity in the representation of feminine figures which usually develop individual actions. From a stylistic point of view, however, they differ from the use of the bright illumination that was characteristic of, for instance the Amélia series, as referred to earlier. They rather use a diffuse light, with fluid contours, reproducing nostalgic environments that are inhabited by absent figures of romantic inspiration.

Sandra Vieira Jürgens

Selected bibliography David Barro, Viagens no Tempo, Mimesis, Oporto, 2004.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 232 23/12/08 0:26:03 232 BESART / RITA MAGALHÃES 233 BESART / RITA MAGALHÃES

Rita Magalhães

Sandra Vieira Jürgens

Selected bibliography David Barro, Viagens no Tempo, Mimesis, Oporto, 2004.

Untitled #87, 2004 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) · 70 x 50 cm · Edition 2/5 Untitled #88, 2004 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) · 70 x 50 cm · Edition 1/5

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 232 23/12/08 0:26:03 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 233 23/12/08 0:26:08 234 BESART / DANIEL MALHÃO

Daniel Malhão

Daniel Malhão (1971, Lisbon, Portugal) is one of the photographers of his generation who has shown a great interest in the specificity of the photographic medium and the desire to see what it represents (and what its inherent limitation are). Aware that photography will always reflect the world in a non-materialised way, albeit through a medium that has form and consistency, the artist never neglects the fascination of the images he produces. Daniel Malhão was selected for the BES Photo 2007 award, where he presented «As Far as I Can See» (2007-2008). They are a set of sea landscapes from which the horizon line has been removed, separating the images into diptychs. This recent project brings together the artist’s two main areas of interest referred to above: it shows his obsession with indexing within the image both the visibility and the projection of embodied visual elements. The idiosyncrasies of his photographic directions are reflected in the series Pó (2005-2006), which also contains a reflection on space and how it manifests itself in the photographic image and the projection of the viewer’s gaze. Refusing to use poetic subterfuges or an interpretation beyond what is seen, Daniel Malhão’s work shows a materialism fascinated by its subject of study. The images from Pó show luminous particles of matter that glow against a black background: the title is restrained but the eye never contradicts the beauty of the image. Encompassing a spatial range going from the infinitesimally small to the maximum retinal projection of the horizon and its glare, Daniel Malhão finds in architecture his balance between one and the other. Deriving mostly from com- missions, both the architecture images and those shot in his studio are able to invert the viewer’s position. Bloco das Águas Livres (2004) is part of a series of commissioned photographs dedicated to the Portuguese architect Teotónio Pereira. By capturing a vertiginous trailing line, this image in particular allows for the viewer to guess what is revealed as an inherent concern in the artist’s work: the materialisation of the visible horizon.

Joana Neves

Selected bibliography Joana Neves, ‘Sem Título’, in BES Photo 2007, Museu Colecção Berardo, Lisbon, 2008.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 234 23/12/08 0:26:08 234 BESART / DANIEL MALHÃO 235 BESART / DANIEL MALHÃO

Daniel Malhão

Joana Neves

Selected bibliography Joana Neves, ‘Sem Título’, in BES Photo 2007, Museu Colecção Berardo, Lisbon, 2008.

Bloco das Águas Livres, 2004 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) · 110 x 140 cm · Edition 2/2 + 1 AP

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 234 23/12/08 0:26:08 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 235 23/12/08 0:26:13 236 BESART / SYLVIE MARTEL ROUQUET

Sylvie Martel Rouquet

Text and the use of language are inherent to Sylvie Martel Rouquet’s (1981, Oporto, Portugal) artistic interventions. Martel Rouquet was one of the winners of the first edition of the BES Revelação photography contest in 2005. Following that joint initiative by Banco Espírito Santo and Fundação de Serralves she exhibited On Habit (2005) and As the saying goes... (2004) in Casa de Serralves. Two works of each of these series were acquired or the BESart collection. In the first, including Anna and Chloe, we see photographs of everyday objects, along with texts, consisting of fictional narratives pointing out very particular references to personal habits and the experience of using those objects. The works from the second series, A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds and It’s not worth crying over spilt milk also reveal the image- text relationship as an essential element for reflection. They belong to a body of work in which the artist refers to popular Portuguese proverbs, confronting their universal value and patterns with more particular images marked by the lack of narrative action. Releasing an interaction between the trivial sense of popular sayings and the enigmatic expression of the environments represented, these works lead the viewer to find new associations for interpretation that transcend the obvious. They call upon a universe of more personal experiences, a dimension, which, combined with the call for the building of a narrative by the viewer themselves, creates a particular form of interpellation. They give a new drive to the activity of interpretation that is open to reordering, transposition and subjec- tification, thus allowing for the emergence of multiple ‘readings’.

Sandra Vieira Jürgens

Selected bibliography BES Revelação’05, Fundação de Serralves, Oporto, 2005.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 236 23/12/08 0:26:13 236 BESART / SYLVIE MARTEL ROUQUET 237 BESART / SYLVIE MARTEL ROUQUET

Sylvie Martel Rouquet

Sandra Vieira Jürgens

Selected bibliography BES Revelação’05, Fundação de Serralves, Oporto, 2005.

It’s not worth crying over spilt milk, from the series As the saying goes…, 2004 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) mounted on PVC · 43 x 30.7 cm · Edition 2/4 A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds, from the series As the saying goes…, 2004 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) mounted on PVC · 43 x 30.7 cm · Edition 1/4 Chloe, from the series On habit, 2005 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) mounted on PVC · 42 x 24.5 cm · Edition 2/4 Anna, from the series On habit, 2005 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) mounted on PVC · 42 x 24.5 cm · Edition 2/4

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 236 23/12/08 0:26:13 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 237 23/12/08 0:26:23 238 BESART / EDGAR MARTINS

Edgar Martins

A dazzling international recognition among British and New York critics projects Edgar Martins (1977, Évora, Portugal) as one of the emergent artists in contemporary photography. Ever since his first works Edgar Martins has shown an extreme photographic accuracy, not just on a technical or compositional level but also in his choice of subjects. From the analysis of the various photographic series exhibited or published in books in recent years, we immediately perceive the artist’s conceptual domain as that concerning the ambivalence of images and the surprise effects which lighting (whether natural or artificial) are able to project on our visual perception. In spite of the diversity of issues he approaches throughout his work (from air- ports to Icelandic natural landscapes) Edgar Martins seems to prefer night shots or interior images in which he applies a careful artificial lighting in order to con- figure a disturbing and tense atmosphere of likelihood. Invisible or almost forgotten spaces eventually become protagonists under the scrupulous lens of the artist. As if unveiling the other side of visible reality his images maintain an aura of transgression into any chance of sensory truth. At a formal level, the subtle use of colour, along with games of symmetry and balance of the elements, reflect an extreme aestheticisation, which, in spite of the intense elaboration, still refers to a concrete reality. Both Untitled (EM01) and Untitled (EM03), which belong to the The Diminishing Present (2005) series maintain an ethereal dimension of suspicion about the identity of the photographed spaces, supported by the projection of an enigmatic and powerful light that sits between the natural landscape and the semi-peripheral landscape it references. The apparently well-defined borders between urban and rural spaces are here contradicted by the uncertainty concerning identity, a permeability and flow of spaces that resist cataloguing, extending the possibilities for interpretation that arise. On the other hand, the space-time suspension of these landscapes manifests itself in the way image perception is experienced, between the observed reality and its tendency towards an aesthetic and formal autonomisation.

David Santos

Selected bibliography Edgar Martins. Topologies, Aperture, New York, 2008.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 238 23/12/08 0:26:23 238 BESART / EDGAR MARTINS 239 BESART / EDGAR MARTINS

Edgar Martins

David Santos

Selected bibliography Edgar Martins. Topologies, Aperture, New York, 2008.

Untitled, from the series The Diminishing Present (chapter 2), 2005 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) mounted on aluminium · 75 x 85 cm · Edition 1/5 + 1 AP Untitled, from the series The Diminishing Present (chapter 2), 2005 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) mounted on aluminium · 75 x 85 cm · Edition 1/5 + 1 AP

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 238 23/12/08 0:26:23 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 239 23/12/08 0:26:25 240 BESART / SUSAN MEISELAS

Susan Meiselas

The North American Susan Meiselas (1948, Baltimore, MD, USA) initially became well known in photojournalistic circles, because of the documentary approach that is evident in her photographic work. Her ﬁrst photographic project, which ended in the publication of the book Carnival Strippers (1976), documented the life of several strippers performing in New England through photographs and recorded dialogues between the dancers and different characters surrounding them, be they their boyfriends, agents or clients. In 1977, Meiselas became an associate photographer for the Magnum Agency. In that same year she visited Nicaragua with the intention to photograph armed combat between the Somoza dictatorship and the Sandinista opposition. The result was the publication of Nicaragua: June 1978-July 1979. Another document that would mark her photographic practice in different regions of the world was Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997), a project that led Meiselas to join Kurdish refugees in camps on the Iranian border, between 1992 and 1997, and to tell their history through the photographic representation of images gathered with the cooperation of anthropologists, missionaries, journalists and members of the Kurdish population. The two works of Susan Meiselas included in the BESart collection are part of a project of a completely different nature. Meiselas produced Night Watch, Cova da Moura following the invitation extended to her in 2004 to photograph contemporary Portugal, and to integrate her work in the exhibition Espelho Meu – Portugal visto por fotógrafos da Magnum, which was the result of the discovery of over 1000 images of Portugal in the archives of the French agency which had never been subject to any editing or public presentation. The purpose of updating and overcoming the chronologic void that existed in the Magnum archives, which only comprised photographs until the 1990s, led Susan Meiselas to visit Portugal for the ﬁrst time and to capture the phenomenon of immigration that characterises contemporary Portuguese reality. In her images shot at Cova da Moura, the artist offers us a particular view, simultaneously close up and human, on the Cape-Verdian community that inhabits the ‘distant’ and ‘better to avoid’ neighbourhood in the Lisbon area. Meiselas received numerous awards throughout her career, including the Robert Capa Gold Medal, awarded by the Overseas Press Club, and the Leica Excellency Medal, for her works in Central America.

Sandra Vieira Jürgens

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 240 23/12/08 0:26:26 240 BESART / SUSAN MEISELAS 241 BESART / SUSAN MEISELAS

Susan Meiselas

Sandra Vieira Jürgens

Selected bibliography Ken Light, Witness in our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington and London, 2000. Melissa Harris, ‘On Location: With Annie Leibovitz, Lorna Simpson, Susan Meiselas, Cindy Sherman, Adam Fuss, Joel-Peter Witkin, Jon Goodman’, Aperture, no. 133, 1993. Susan Meiselas, Nicaragua: June 1978-July 1979, Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1981. Susan Meiselas, Carnival Strippers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1976. Night Watch I, Cova da Moura, 2004 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 30 x 40 cm · © the artist / Magnum Photos Night Watch II, Cova da Moura, 2004 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 30 x 40 cm · © the artist / Magnum Photos

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 240 23/12/08 0:26:26 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 241 23/12/08 14:58:47 242 BESART / SUSANA MENDES SILVA

Susana Mendes Silva

Susana Mendes Silva (1972, Lisbon, Portugal) has exhibited her work regularly since the end of the 1990s. Her most recent solo exhibitions were: Square Disorder (2008) at the Appleton Square gallery (Lisbon); Did I Hurt You? (2006), at the Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea gallery (Lisbon); and Life-cage (2005), at the Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art gallery, Lisbon. In 2008 she won the Ariane de Rothschild Painting Prize in Lisbon, with a series of photographs titled Phantasia (2007). The realisation of Susana Mendes Silva’s work moves between various media that operate in a permanent connection with each other. Her practice may be anchored by two elements: drawing and performance. Drawing relates to writing (text, idiomatic expressions, language) or to the inscription of space-generating lines (by using hair placed in different architectonic situations for example). The idea of performance (resulting in drawings, video, photography, objects) arises (from the insistence) of a certain action or from on-line interventions which trigger unpredictable dialogues. The photograph (prevenção da) Vertigem (2001), shown during one of her ﬁrst solo exhibitions, contained already some of these core elements of her work. The title ‘prevents vertigo’, whereas the images suggest the predisposition for suffering from it using various devices – the lowering of an unstable body (ballet shoes, crutches, high heels, ladders), the out of focus observation, the lack of balance. Likewise, in other works, different strategies are used to trigger this same evocation of the weakness of our body. The simultane- ity between distance and proximity of a voice (Artphone, 2002), the blurring of the boundary between appearance and disappearance (Polaroid, 2004), the intervention in the period between waking and sleeping (Bedtime Story, 2007), the pro- posed perception of a non-space (Square Disorder, 2008). Loss of balance. Desire. Restlessness. Temptation. Urge.

Maria do Mar Fazenda

Selected bibliography 3rd Ariane de Rothschild Painting Prize, Lisbon, 2008. (Re)volver, Plataforma Revólver, Lisbon, 2006. Life-cage, Susana Mendes Silva/Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisbon, 2005. A Dois, CENTA, Vila Velha de Rodão, 2005. www.susanamendessilva.com

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 242 23/12/08 14:58:47 242 BESART / SUSANA MENDES SILVA 243 BESART / SUSANA MENDES SILVA

Susana Mendes Silva

Maria do Mar Fazenda

(prevenção da) Vertigem, 2001 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 127 x 170 cm · Edition 2/3 (prevenção da) Vertigem, 2001 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 127 x 170 cm · Edition 2/3

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 242 23/12/08 14:58:47 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 243 23/12/08 14:58:53 244 BESART / DUANE MICHALS

Duane Michals

The relationship between Duane Michals (1932, McKeesport, PA, USA) and photography is clearly marked by insufficiency. Photography for this artist does not often live up to the expectations concerning its ability to depict reality. Though he acknowledges that no other instrument reproduces the shapes of the world with such loyalty, Michals also understands that a lot of what happens in reality isn’t captured by photography, especially because the part of reality that interests him the most is invisible. Ever since his personal work became a priority in the mid-1960s, Michals’ work has been dominated by a constant quest for the expression of humans’ inner lives. Fear, desire or anguish are a few of his preferred references in this meta- physical exercise, which, as Michals soon learned, exists far beyond the realm of images or of words. Rejecting any obligations towards disciplinary purity, Michals invested in the creation of a visual universe in which photography and text create visual allegories and metaphors and that stimulate us to scrutinise different conditions and ways of feeling. The project The House I Once Called Home emerged from Michals’ return to his family home in McKeesport in 2002. Within this series we discover some of the resources through which the artist seeks to dilute photography’s limitations, whether it is through the sequencing of images, the construction of narratives, the use of captions and handwritten texts, or the overlapping of negatives from different moments in time. Constituted by all these different elements and resources, the affectivity and emotional load that characterise Michals’ work stand out in this set, alongside his mistakes, vulnerability and doubts. All these elements, conscious and assumed, coalesce in establishing what Michals ex- pects to be an extended field for the exchange of a sensitive practice. Among other prizes, Michals’ work has won him the Infinity Award for Art from the International Center of Photography in New York in 1991 and the PHotoEspaña award in 2001.

Bruno Marchand

Selected bibliography Marco Livingstone, The Essential Duane Michals, Bulﬁnch, Boston, 1997. Max Kozloff, Now Becoming Then, Twin Palms, Altadena, 1990. João Miguel Fernandes Jorge, Duane Michals: Há Palavras Que Têm de ser Ditas, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, 1990. Jack Woody, Album: The Portraits of Duane Michals, Twelvetrees Press, Pasadena, 1988.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 244 23/12/08 14:58:53 244 BESART / DUANE MICHALS 245 BESART / DUANE MICHALS

Duane Michals

Bruno Marchand

The House I Once Called Home, 2002 (2006) Gelatin Silver Print and handwritten text · 30 x (35.56 x 27.94 cm) · Edition 4/25

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 244 23/12/08 14:58:53 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 245 23/12/08 14:59:09 246 BESART / DUANE MICHALS

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 246 23/12/08 14:59:26 246 BESART / DUANE MICHALS 247 BESART / DUANE MICHALS

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 246 23/12/08 14:59:26 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 247 23/12/08 14:59:55 248 BESART / RICHARD MISRACH

Richard Misrach

Richard Misrach (1949, Los Angeles, CA, USA) is known for his large-scale photographs of natural landscapes often touched by human presence and actions. Inspired artists like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, he started to exhibit his works in the mid 1970s, having selected as his theme the North American desert. He created several series dedicated to this landscape over a period of more than two decades, exploring its sites and colours, and the effects caused by man’s behaviour (an abandoned nuclear power plant) and by nature (fires). Gathered under the title Desert Cantos and grouped around distinct themes, as if obeying to the structure of a long poem, his work was the subject of a retrospective exhibition organised by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, in 1996, which subsequently toured the United States. Richard Misrach broadened his thematic pallete to other natural locations (marshland) and human constructions (like the series Golden Gate dedicated to the bridge with the same name, in San Francisco) in the 1990s. However, the beauty of his images cannot be limited to a momentary visual impact: it triggers political, social and even philosophical resonances. That is the case of the work selected for this exhibition. Part of the series On the Beach (2003), this photograph portrays two women floating alone in the ocean, near a beach in Hawaii. Stripped from a horizon and sky, counting only on the texture and colour of the water, the image conveys serenity and peace while accentuating the vulnerability of human beings. What looks like a moment of relaxation may imply isolation and forebode tragedy. The photograph takes its title from the novel by Nevil Shute (first edition 1957), about a nuclear holo- caust, and was shot some days after 9/11. It was first exhibited to the public at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. Among the awards received by the artist, the Kulturpreis Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie in 2002, is most notable.

José Marmeleira

Selected bibliography Richard Misrach: On The Beach, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Aperture, New York, 2007. Pictures of Paintings, Powerhouse Cultural Entertainment Books, New York, 2007. Geoff Dyer, ‘Photographs from “On the Beach”: Richard Misrach’, in Modern Painters, London, Spring 2004.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 248 23/12/08 14:59:55 248 BESART / RICHARD MISRACH 249 BESART / RICHARD MISRACH

Richard Misrach

José Marmeleira

Untitled, 2003 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 182 x 206 cm · Edition 3/5

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 248 23/12/08 14:59:55 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 249 23/12/08 14:59:57 250 BESART / TRACEY MOFFATT

Tracey Moffatt

Tracey Moffatt (1959, Brisbane, Australia) uses video, film and photography to create images and narratives that deal with identity and sexual and cultural stereotypes and the imaginary of mass culture. Her approach is marked by the recovery of collective and personal memories (as a viewer or a fan), which she uses as material for her works. One of her most commonly used methods is the collage of distinct references (Australian history and art, cinema, suburban spaces) from which she creates scenes that are as emotional and ‘real’ as they are absurd or fantastic. Examples can be found in her film Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1989), on the trauma that burdens the relations between aborigines and white people, the touching photographic series Scarred for Life (1994) or the images that oscillate between fantasy and psychodrama in Laudanum (1998) and Invocations (2000). The four works presented here show a certain level of stylisation, cunning- ness and her ability to visually and formally recreate a narrative, which characterises Moffatt’s practice at large. In the series Under the Sign of Scorpio (2005) we find the artist taking on the persona of famous women born under the sign of Scorpio, like Hillary Clinton or Catherine Deneuve. The portraits are edited in Photoshop, filled with irony and humour, and can be considered as cinematic heteronyms invented by the artist. Likewise, the panel that belongs to the Adventures Series refers to pop culture, more specifically TV series and cartoons from Moffatt’s childhood. Made with the collaboration of actors, illustrators and designers, it celebrates and monitors the passage of time against memories and images promised. The two series were exhibited together at Spazio Oberdan (2006) in Milan, and on their own in institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney (2003) and the Lothar Albrecht Gallery in Frankfurt (2006). In 2007 Moffatt received the Infinity Award (in the Art category) from the International Center of Photography, New York.

José Marmeleira

Selected bibliography Filippo Maggia, Tracey Moffatt. Between Dreams and Reality, Skira, Milan, 2006. Tracey Moffatt, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1999. Tracey Moffatt. Fever Pitch, Piper Press, Sydney, 1996.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 250 23/12/08 14:59:57 250 BESART / TRACEY MOFFATT 251 BESART / TRACEY MOFFATT

Tracey Moffatt

José Marmeleira

Under the Sign of Scorpio (Shere Hite), 2005 Inkjet print on cotton paper · 43 x 58 cm · Edition 6/21 Under the Sign of Scorpio (Hillary R. Clinton), 2005 Inkjet print on cotton paper · 43 x 58 cm · Edition 6/21 Under the Sign of Scorpio (Catherine Deneuve), 2005 Inkjet print on cotton paper · 43 x 58 cm · Edition 6/21

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 250 23/12/08 14:59:57 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 251 23/12/08 15:00:18 252 BESART / ADRIANA MOLDER

Adriana Molder

The photographic image is an unusual element in Adriana Molder’s (1975, Lisbon, Portugal) work. Used to the black blotch on drawing paper, the image here is not made by the artist’s hand but rather it is the instance of the possibility of these images. The nocturnal scenario suggested by the title of the series – a quote from a quote by Agatha Christie at the beginning of her crime novel Endless Night, after a poem by William Blake, Auguries of Innocence. Adriana Molder departs from that quote as if from her own bewilderment: ‘Every Night and every Morn Some to Misery are born. Every Morn and every Night Some are born to Sweet Delight Some are born to Sweet Delight Some are born to Endless Night’ This is the experience that Molder enacts with the character in her photographs. The series, comprised of twelve pictures, is a kind of fictional narrative around a woman and her amazement at her own reflected image: a way of evoking the as- tonishment with the simple fact of existing. Molder’s aim with these works (which are an obvious extension of her drawing practice), is to capture an entire subjective world in the physiognomy: in the atmosphere detected in a face, an expression, a flicker of the eyes. The core of these works is a kind of experimentation of the body on its own, in its natural and internal construction: that is why the succession of images suggests and underlines the performance aspect of these works. Being amazed at oneself – the experience in which the subject is on the verge of not recognising itself – is the decisive element in these works. From the apparent normality and banality of days and nights passing by, arises the indecision of what is meant for us: the ‘endless night’ or the ‘sweet delight’. And the character’s face suggests an ethical attitude of accepting the days and nights, willing to ac- cept the impossibility of having any influence over the facts. These works are not a discussion of the nature of human freedom, but rather of the ‘endless night’ en- closed in each being, a place of darkness and obscurity, appearing as something which may fall upon us. And the body is its expressive and symbolic testimony.

Nuno Crespo

Selected bibliography Nuno Crespo, ‘Adriana Molder e a Arte do Retrato’, in Público, Lisbon, August 2006. Cartola, Galeria Presença, Oporto, 2003. Câmara de Gelo, Sintra Museu de Arte Moderna – Colecção Berardo, Sintra, 2002.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 252 23/12/08 15:00:19 252 BESART / ADRIANA MOLDER 253 BESART / ADRIANA MOLDER

Adriana Molder

Nuno Crespo

From the series Noite Sem Fim #2, 2005 Print-Out Process on drawing paper · 2 x (100 x 133 cm) · Edition 1/3 From the series Noite Sem Fim #1, 2005 Print-Out Process on drawing paper · 100 x 133 cm · Edition 1/3

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 252 23/12/08 15:00:19 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 253 23/12/08 15:00:41 254 BESART / JORGE MOLDER

Jorge Molder

The work by Jorge Molder (1947, Lisbon, Portugal) has since the 1970s developed as a reflection on self-representation in any of the media he has been using: from black and white photography to Polaroids, digitally-printed colour photography, or, more recently, video. His images are almost always the result of the creation of characters played by the artist himself, often derived from a capacity of transfiguration, which is mainly due to the dramatic use of lighting and framing rather than any other devices. Those characters are also the result of a reflection on the figure of the double, the doppelgänger, within the tradition of nineteenth-century gothic literature, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Dostoyevski, E.T.A. Hoffman or Edgar Allan Poe. However, such literary influences, despite burdening images with a dramatic intensity, do not define a narrative universe, although fiction is always present in the stage sets that the artist creates. The photographs in this collection come from a different series – the artist always produces his works following a serial logic. The image from The Secret Agent (1991) belongs to a set of works that are particularly relevant in the artist’s career. Referring to the influence of Joseph Conrad, it shows plenty of mysterious elements: evoking the figure of the illusionist, exposed by the gloved hand immersed in a strange glass box with the inscription ‘acid level’, for instance. The image of the hand holding a glass, from the series Circunstâncias Atenuantes (2003), is a recurring image in Molder’s work, and is also present in various ways in the series Joseph Conrad, Nós Como Futuro, História Trágico-Marítima and The Portuguese Dutchman – which he worked on throughout the 1990s – and can therefore be considered a core typology in the entire artist’s œuvre. In 1999, Jorge Molder represented Portugal at the Venice Biennial, where he exhibited Nox, which was subsequently shown at the Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon.

Delﬁm Sardo

Selected bibliography Jorge Molder Condições de Possibilidade, Centro de Artes Visuais, Coimbra, 2006. Algún Tempo Antes, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, 2006. Delﬁm Sardo (ed.), Luxury Bound, a Fotograﬁa de Jorge Molder, Assírio & Alvim/Electa, Lisbon/Milan, 1999.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 254 23/12/08 15:00:42 254 BESART / JORGE MOLDER 255 BESART / JORGE MOLDER

Jorge Molder

Delﬁm Sardo

From the series The Secret Agent, 1991 Gelatin silver print · 102 x 102 cm · Edition of 3 + 1 AP From the series Circunstâncias Atenuantes, 2003 Gelatin silver print · 102 x 102 cm · Edition of 3 + 1 AP

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 254 23/12/08 15:00:42 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 255 23/12/08 15:00:48 256 BESART / ABELARDO MORELL

Abelardo Morell

Emigrating in 1962 to the United States following the Cuban Revolution, Abelardo Morell (1948, Havana, Cuba) received his photographic training and developed his career there. He has also received recognition in his adopted homeland, in 2006 for instance with the Rappaport Award (DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, USA). His projects or isolated images are extraordinary representations of the western imaginary, simultaneously witness of its insignificance and challenging its ra- tionality, which suggests a surrealist inclination in his view onto the world – as if he were looking at it through hidden doors which only imagination can open. But what we always remember are two of his most famous projects: Camera Obscura, to which the two images here belong and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, connected to his interest in the metamorphosis of books when observed in an un- canonical manner. Camera Obscura accumulates pictures almost always taken in hotel rooms in which the photographer is staying during his travels. He transforms each room by preparing it as a dark chamber using a narrow pinhole which lets the image in and projects it inverted on walls. This operation, which naturally takes hours of fine-tuning, represents the process of the generation of an image in a dark chamber. The image is not only projected onto the wall but also on the various objects within the room. Sometimes the photographer emphasises the inverted projection by placing a postcard of the projected subject on the wall. The final result of the installation is a photograph that, like the two in the collection, shows us the projection being horizontally developed on the room’s walls, making an angle of 90º. The impact of the inversion of the image and the apparently linear development result in a surreal effect. Our visual stability is underlined by the normality of the objects in the room, but the inverted external image is insinuated into our perception, overlapping on the volume of the objects and challenging our notion of what is outside and what is inside.

Maria do Carmo Serén

Selected bibliography Richard B. Woodward, Abelardo Morell, Phaidon, London, 2006. Camera Obscura, Bulﬁnch Press, New York, 2004. A Book of Books, Bulﬁnch Press, New York, 2002. Abelardo Morell. Face to Face: Photographs at the Gardner Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, 1998.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 256 23/12/08 15:00:48 256 BESART / ABELARDO MORELL 257 BESART / ABELARDO MORELL

Abelardo Morell

Maria do Carmo Serén

Camera Obscura, Image of Manhattan View Looking West, in Empty Room, 1996 Gelatin silver print · 50.8 x 60.96 cm · Edition 3/30 Camera Obscura, Image of London Eye Inside the Royal Horseguards Hotel, 2001 Gelatin silver print · 50.8 x 60.96 cm · Edition 6/30

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 256 23/12/08 15:00:48 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 257 23/12/08 17:01:28 258 BESART / MATT MULLICAN

Matt Mullican

The entire œuvre of Matt Mullican (1951, Santa Monica, CA, USA) has developed itself from a kind of founding moment, often described by the artist in interviews: when he was an art student at Cal Arts (Los Angeles) during the 1970s, in a subject where students had no longer access to any work space – post- studio art – Mullican started drawing an imaginary studio inhabited by an alter ego, Glen. In that space, which the artists translated into comics, all that could happen in a physical area of that nature, anything between work and leisure, or a mixture of both, occurred: Glen would draw, watch TV, have fun with friends, wash his hands, and masturbate. Then the artist started drawing Glen getting hurt, getting burnt. According to Mullican, he wanted to ‘depict the pain that my wooden character feels when its arm is pinched’; he wanted to show that such character had an existence as real as his own. Ultimately, he wanted to prove that although it could be a parallel reality, it was still a reality. He wanted to understand the image space in the same way as he understood the world. And it is from these drawings of Glen that Mullican’s went on to create a world in his work that is as real as the one that surrounds us. A world governed by equally complex relations and symbols. From that stubborn intention of inhabiting a drawing – someone has labelled it as childish – a body of work has emerged, which uses painting, sculpture, video, computer animation and photography. Through an imbricate symbolic system, a real map of a parallel world is outlined. But the artist does not only try to represent it, he lets us enter it in an attempt to prove that it is no less real. That system includes computer-generated images, including the sky and sea photographs entitled Default Atmospheres (2006). In their similarity to images captured by a camera, the artist exposes the privileged relationship of photography within a false reality as ﬁction, as well as the mere possibility of a purely visual image to exist.

Ricardo Nicolau

Selected bibliography Matt Mullican. Model Architecture, Hatje Cantz, Ostﬁldern, 2006. Dora Garcia, ‘El mapa es el territorio. Sobre el trabajo de Matt Mullican y Thomas Bayrle’, in Estrategias del Dibujo en el Arte Contemporáneo, Cátedra, Madrid, 2002. Matt Mullican. More Details from an Imaginary Universe, Hopefulmonster, Turin, 2000.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 258 23/12/08 17:01:29 258 BESART / MATT MULLICAN 259 BESART / MATT MULLICAN

Matt Mullican

Ricardo Nicolau

Untitled (Default Atmosphere) #12, 2006 Inkjet prints · 70 x 100 cm · Unique print Untitled (Default Atmosphere) #15, 2006 Inkjet prints · 70 x 100 cm · Unique print

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 258 23/12/08 17:01:29 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 259 23/12/08 17:01:33 260 BESART / VIK MUNIZ

Vik Muniz

Vik Muniz (1961, São Paulo, Brazil) is an artist who is able to surprise us with each new work, partly due to the unusual materials he uses, including chocolate, jelly, peanut butter, paint, wire and sugar. The unconventional results are sometimes hard to classify: they hover between drawing and painting, sculpture and photography. The artist renders representation and recognition problematic and creates ephemeral objects that are then captured in a photograph. The works presented here are part of three series: Pictures of Diamonds, Caviar Monsters and Pictures of Soil. The first two are interconnected, as they are portraits of iconic Hollywood figures. The portraits of film divas – Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Sophia Loren, among others – are opposed by portraits of cinema monsters – Frankenstein, the Lagoon Monster, Dracula and the Phantom of the Opera: beauties and beasts, diamonds and caviar, bright and dark. The attraction caused by the first series was remarkable and the works were quickly sold. However, in Muniz’s opinion, they were not correctly interpreted: the reflection on their intrinsic value as art was ignored. Muniz wanted to test if the brightness of the divas was sufficient to bear the intrinsic brightness of the diamonds. Although also a luxury item, contrary to diamonds, caviar has a shelf life. As such, each monster brought with itself the idea of decadence, degradation and death that contradicted the notion of eternity conveyed by the precious stones. The series Pictures of Soil was part of the solo exhibition entitled A Terra e a Gente [the land and the people], held in 2007, at Museu da Electricidade, in Lisbon. The artist used Portuguese soil to execute the portraits of national symbols and personalities, which generated some controversy.

Luísa Especial

Selected bibliography Reﬂex, A Vik Muniz Primer, Aperture Foundation, London, New York, 2005. Moacir dos Anjos, James Elkins, Shelley Rice, Vik Muniz. Obra Incompleta. Edições Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, 2004. Vik Muniz. Model Pictures, Menil Collection, Houston, 2002. Vik Muniz, Electa Mondadori, Milan, 2003. Mark Durant, Charles Stainback, Vik Muniz. Seeing is Believing, Arena, Santa Fe, 1998.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 260 23/12/08 17:01:33 260 BESART / VIK MUNIZ 261 BESART / VIK MUNIZ

Vik Muniz

Luísa Especial

Brigitte Bardot (Diamond Divas), 2004 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 150 x 120 cm · Edition 4/10 Frankenstein (Caviar Monsters), 2004 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 150 x 120 cm · Edition 4/10

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 260 23/12/08 17:01:33 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 261 23/12/08 17:01:47 262 BESART / VIK MUNIZ

Amália Rodrigues, from the series Pictures of Soil, 2007 Digital Chromogenic Print (Process LightJet) · 249 x 190 x 5 cm · Edition 1/5 Fernando Pessoa, from the series Pictures of Soil, 2007 Digital Chromogenic Print (Process LightJet) · 198 x 190 x 5 cm · Edition 1/5

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 262 23/12/08 17:01:51 262 BESART / VIK MUNIZ 263 BESART / VIK MUNIZ

Cristiano Ronaldo, from the series Pictures of Soil, 2007 Digital Chromogenic Print (Process LightJet) · 238 x 190 x 5 cm · Edition 1/5 António Damásio, from the series Pictures of Soil, 2007 Digital Chromogenic Print (Process LightJet) · 249 x 190 x 5 cm · Edition 1/5 Amália Rodrigues, from the series Pictures of Soil, 2007 Digital Chromogenic Print (Process LightJet) · 249 x 190 x 5 cm · Edition 1/5 José Saramago, from the series Pictures of Soil, 2007 Digital Chromogenic Print (Process LightJet) · 285 x 190 x 5 cm · Edition 1/5 Fernando Pessoa, from the series Pictures of Soil, 2007 Digital Chromogenic Print (Process LightJet) · 198 x 190 x 5 cm · Edition 1/5 Álvaro Siza, from the series Pictures of Soil, 2007 Digital Chromogenic Print (Process LightJet) · 259 x 190 x 5 cm · Edition 1/5

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 262 23/12/08 17:01:51 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 263 23/12/08 17:01:58 264 BESART / PAULO V

Paulo Nozolino

Living between Lisbon, Oporto and Paris, Paulo Nozolino (1955, Lisbon, Portugal) 1 ‘Nada’. Mots, écrans, photos, Paulo started his career at the Associação Portuguesa de Arte Fotográfica, between Nozolino, Oporto, November 22nd, 2001, Paris, Maison Européenne de 1974 and 1975, during the April Revolution, after which he graduated from the la Photographie, 2002, p. 29. London College of Printing. An extensive period of travelling followed during which the artist photographed what he would later call his ‘nomad autobiogra- p hy’. In 1978, Nozolino returned to Lisbon where he installed a laboratory and immersed himself in the negatives of the photographs taken during his journeys. Nozolino has always preferred travelling as a basic condition for photographers who act like ‘runaway witnesses’. During his travels, from the surroundings of Rome to the Berlin underground, from suburban Bucharest to Shibam, Yemen, Nozolino queries the cities and the individual’s place within them. ‘The first time I arrived in Tangier, I was sure’, writes Nozolino in his introduction of the book Penumbra which led him through Morocco, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Mauritania, Jordan... Places are not very important; it is a permanence of landscapes, faces, Arabic culture that appears in black and white images, very intense and grainy. In his rare exhibitions, Nozolino shows large formats in black and white, favouring dark environments and suffocating universes, pursuing the idea that ‘everything has a story, each story has two versions and each version has its past’. ‘I travel through Asia, Europe and the Arabic world. In the banality of daily life I see signs that will mark me forever. I walk over the garbage-filled streets of Cairo and I see the sublime; I look upon the walls of Auschwitz and I touch the sacred; I stop in front of a shop window in Vienna and notice the futility. I capture the whole from nothing. Sometimes I think in this whole locked up in my memory. In the solitude of a hotel room, at night, I revisit my fears, my mistakes, the faces of my parents, my friends, the women I loved, my children, death, my detoxed alcoholism and my concerns with money.’1

Jean-François Chougnet

Selected bibliography Far cry. Paulo Nozolino, Steidl/Fundação de Serralves, Göttingen/Oporto, 2005 Paulo Nozolino, Rui Baião, Nuez, Frenesi, Lisbon, 2003 Paulo Nozolino, Antoine Volodine, Fim, Fundação Oriente, Lisbon, 2001 Paulo Nozolino, Penumbra, Scalo, Zürich, 1996.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 264 23/12/08 17:01:58 264 BESART / PAULO V 265 BESART / PAULO NOZOLINO

Paulo Nozolino

Jean-François Chougnet

Dead Crows, Mons-Boubert, 1992 Gelatin silver print, mounted on aluminium · 80 x 120 cm · Edition 1/3

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 264 23/12/08 17:01:58 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 265 23/12/08 17:02:06 266 BESART / PAULO NOZOLINO

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 266 23/12/08 17:02:39 266 BESART / PAULO NOZOLINO 267 BESART / PAULO NOZOLINO

Tangenziale Est, Rome, 2000 Gelatin silver print, mounted on aluminium · 80 x 120 cm · Edition 2/3 Subway, Berlin, 1995 Gelatin silver print, mounted on aluminium · 80 x 120 cm · Edition 3/3 Two of us, Shibam, 1995 Gelatin silver print, mounted on aluminium · 80 x 120 cm · Edition 1/3 Brick Wall, Bucharest, 2003 Gelatin silver print, mounted on aluminium · 120 x 80 cm · Edition 1/3 Shadows, Seiyum, 1995 Gelatin silver print, mounted on aluminium · 80 x 120 cm · Edition 2/3 Broken Wave, Sagres, 1984 Print gelatin chloro-bromet paper mounted on aluminium · 90 x 60 cm · Edition 1/3

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 266 23/12/08 17:02:39 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 267 23/12/08 17:03:06 268 BESART / MELIK OHANIAN

Melik Ohanian

Melik Ohanian (1969, Lyon, France) is of Armenian origin and lives and works in Paris. The philosophical reference of the context in which his work appears is Henri Bergson’s concept of élan-vital, which inspired Deleuze to develop a non- anthropocentric vision of history, in which the notion of event is not considered in relation to the will of its agents but to the interaction of complex systems. The ideas of cosmo-politics, non-linear history or system theory are contemporary exponents of this strand of thinking, which relates geology with economy or the philosophy of language as a way to understand the relations between organisms and their surrounding eco-systems, especially when the eco-system is a cultural system. In Claire Denis’ films, such as L’Intrus (2004), we may observe her poetic manifestation in the way the landscape’s beauty takes on an intrusive influence upon the decisions of the characters. In his film Seven Minutes Before (2004), Melik Ohanian superimposes an Asian girl playing a slightly howling melody with the howling of a caged wolf, the sound of water running in a stream or the crackling of fire inside an abandoned barn. Filmed in the Alps, like the film by Denis, Seven Minutes Before starts with an account of the mysterious death of forty-three horses that are found crushed at the bottom of a ravine and ends with the images of a crash between a van and a motorbike and the explosion of another van without any apparent reason. The film does not provide us with an explanation for any of the events but acts as a poignant attempt to grasp the core of the universe. Similarly in his photographs, such as Selected Recording #075, Ohanian refus- es to provide the viewer with any space-time coordinates. His island remains suspended in the ocean like a raw diamond or a bizarre animal. All references are made through references to another project by the artist, Island of an Island (1998-2000), on the island of Surtsey, which rose from a volcanic eruption in 1963 and remains prohibited to the public like a territory impossible to appropriate.

Ana Pinto

Selected bibliography Jean-Christophe Royoux, Cosmograms, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2005. Nathalie Delbard, ‘Here, Over There, and Nowhere at the Same Time: The Sharing of Space According to Melik Ohanian’, in Parachute, October 2005. Jean-Max Colard, ‘Melik Ohanian’, in Artforum, November 2002.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 268 23/12/08 17:03:06 268 BESART / MELIK OHANIAN 269 BESART / MELIK OHANIAN

Melik Ohanian

Ana Pinto

Selected Recording # 075, sem data Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process), mounted on aluminium · 125 x 183 cm · Unique print

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 268 23/12/08 17:03:06 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 269 23/12/08 17:03:06 270 BESART / ERWIN OLAF

Erwin Olaf

Erwin Olaf’s (1959, Hilversum, The Netherlands) body of work reveals an eclectic truth that dares to destroy the explicit quiescence between photo-journalism and studio photography; between fashion and corporative advertising (BMW, Diesel, Microsoft or Nintendo) and press (The New York Times, The Sunday Times or Citizen K); or between artistic photography, video and film. His work also shows a paradoxical ongoing disruption between digital manipulation and documentary image, or between the excessive profusion of gore baroque and the modernistic restraint of hard-edged minimalism. Grief (2007) portrays the serial logic of Olaf’s work, applied to a classicistic, contemplative and non-computerised imagery, as in Rain (2004) or Hope (2005) and anticipating Fall (2008). Grief is a set of fifteen photographs, of which eight are close-up portraits of the characters whose names are its titles – Sarah, Margaret, Barbara, Irene, Grace, Caroline, Victoria and Troy – and a video. This ensemble spawned a book with the same title and was part of a series of solo exhibitions in 2008 (Human All Too Human, Fotografia Europea, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Rain, Hope, Grief and Fall, Fotomuseum, The Hague, The Netherlands; Grief, Flatland Paris and Gallerie Magda Danysz, France), following Olaf’s nomination as best Dutch artist of the year (Kunstbeeld, 2007). Grief questions what originated the collective feeling of sorrow associated to John F. Kennedy’s funeral, whose media ‘effect’ the artist compares to princess Diana’s death and the 9/11 tragedy. The memory of Jackie Kennedy’s televised suffering is the starting point for the characters’ interrupted choreography, strictly and aristocratically staged, dressed and with their hair done. The luminous derealisation of the monochromatic décors of Grief, dating from 1960s America, reflects the solitary anguish and the expectant nature of the private lives of their melancholic inhabitants. In secret mourning, Sarah waits for someone, whose absence is indicated by a second plate left on the table. The subtle contextuali- sation of the scene, evocative of a Christmas celebration, sharpens and corrobo- rates, as if it were an ultimate and endured manifesto, the complete impossibility of happiness.

Lígia Afonso

Selected bibliography Alasdair Foster, Erwin Olaf, Aperture, New York, 2008. Erwin Olaf. Rain/Hope, Flatland Off the Record, Utrecht, 2006 Erwin Olaf. Silver, Groninger Museum, Groningen, 2003. Olaf Erwin. Violence and Passion, Reﬂex Gallery, Paris, 2000.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 270 23/12/08 17:03:07 270 BESART / ERWIN OLAF 271 BESART / ERWIN OLAF

Erwin Olaf

Lígia Afonso

Sarah, from the series Grief, 2007 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) · 100 x 177.8 cm · Edition 8/10 Sarah Portrait, from the series Grief, 2007 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) · 133 x 100 cm · Edition 8/10

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 270 23/12/08 17:03:07 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 271 23/12/08 17:03:11 272 BESART / ORLAN

Orlan

‘Mon corps est devenu un lieu de débat public qui pose les questions cruciales de 1 ‘My body has been transformed notre temps.’1 This statement by Orlan, (1947, Saint-Étienne, France), highlights into a site of public debate about the crucial questions of our times’. the debate raised by a significant series of works which made her well known on the international art scene, especially in the 1990s, when she embraced the notion of the mutant body by introducing herself as an object for provocative surgi- cal interventions, which have over time transformed her body. Orlan started her career in the 1960s with purely photographic works. One of the photographs in the BESart collection, Femme-girafle Ndebelé souche nguni et visage de femme Euro-Parisienne, 2002, is part of a series of more recent works entitled ‘Self-Hybridisation’, in which the artist continues with her experimentation by performing works illustrating an infinity of possible hybrid identities, combining her image with different icons of civilisation (pre-Co- lumbian, African and Indian-American). The result is a complex set of representations on identity and otherness. The other series of images in the collection, Garanti pure Orlan sans colorants ni conservateurs (1976) represents a previous stage of the artist’s work in which, without reverting to masks and emphasising her nudity, she experiments with the deconstruction of her body, looking at identity and gender issues within the context of a performative action related to the feminist movement. During the performance documented in the photographs, Orlan sold ‘fragments’ of her body parts which had been cut to real life-size – such as ‘mouth’, ‘breast’, ‘nose’, ‘foot’, ‘arm’, ‘buttocks’, ‘pubis’, ‘sex’, confronting the audience with a provocative question: ‘Does my body really belong to me?’ This performance has the peculiarity that it took place in a Portuguese market in 1976. In 2007 the Musée D’Art Moderne in Saint-Étienne dedicated the largest overview exhibition of her work to date. It was entitled ORLAN: Le Récit and brought together works from various stages of her multidisciplinary career.

Sandra Vieira Jürgens

Selected bibliography ORLAN: Le Récit, Charta, Milan, 2007. C. Jill O’Bryan, Orlan’s refacing, University of Minnesota, 2005. Orlan, Éditions Flammarion, Paris, 2004. Orlan 1964-2001, Artium, Salamanca, 2002. Dominique Baqué, Marek Bartelik and Orlan, ORLAN, Reﬁguration Self-hybridations. Pre-Columbian Series, Éditions Al Dante, Paris, 2002.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 272 23/12/08 17:03:11 272 BESART / ORLAN 273 BESART / ORLAN

Orlan

Sandra Vieira Jürgens

Femme-giraﬂe Ndebelé souche nguni et visage de femme Euro-Parisienne, 2002 Digital Chromogenic Print (Process LightJet) · 158 x 127 cm · Edition 6/7

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 272 23/12/08 17:03:11 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 273 23/12/08 17:06:11 274 BESART / ORLAN

Garanti pure Orlan sans colorants ni conservateurs, 1976 Gelatin silver print on baryta paper · 5 x (60 x 60 cm) · Edition 1/3

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 274 23/12/08 17:06:15 274 BESART / ORLAN 275 BESART / ORLAN

Garanti pure Orlan sans colorants ni conservateurs, 1976 Gelatin silver print on baryta paper · 5 x (60 x 60 cm) · Edition 1/3

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 274 23/12/08 17:06:15 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 275 23/12/08 17:06:22 276 BESART / GABRIEL OROZCO

Gabriel Orozco

The photographic work of Gabriel Orozco (1962, Jalapa/Veracruz, Mexico), which was the subject of an exhibition at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington in 2004, plays an essential role, both in terms of its production and in his artistic scenario of the last two decades. Gabriel Orozco has received wide international acclaim, which has brought him to the forefront of attention at the beginning of this century. His formal research connects him with artists like Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, Jean Arp and Kurt Schwitters, as well as with contemporary artists who search for the spontaneous form in daily life. Inversion as a working method, the spiral and the sphere as figures in time (from the perfect sphere to its organic manifestation in an orange, for instance) are some of the elements that are consistently present in the artist’s work. The relation between the object and the space surrounding it is essential, be it the fabric of daily life or the time-space relation that Orozco’s work conceptu- ally encompasses. The artist’s first intervention at the Venice Biennial in 1993 (he also took part in 2003 and 2005), was to place a shoebox on the floor, thus emphasising the completeness of emptiness. This exemplifies the apparent paradox: sometimes, his pieces are limited to a gesture, either taking a photograph or ‘reinforcing’ a readymade, other times they take shape as a virtuous gestuality, creating new forms, thus bringing two vanguard trends together – Duchamp’s readymade and Schwitters’ ‘life space’. Gabriel Orozco photography is almost like a sketchbook. Rolling Life’s Hand Line (2003), reminds us of that element of prepared improvisation as well as his drawing exercise, also introduced by Drawing (2002). The hand and the tree leaf evidence the pleasure in the natural evolution of the line and in its artistic manifestation. The photographs from a trip to Mali, Cemetery (View Six), Drawing and Descending (2002), unveil the paradox. This trip happened after the artists had finished a set of forty-one terracotta pieces on market stands, the production of which ignored the usual firing techniques to control colour standardisation, thickness, emptiness and fullness. Revisiting the shapes that have fascinated him since the beginning of his career (playing an inversion game between the surrounding space and what it surrounds), Orozco worked the clay subjecting the material’s malleability to hazardous forms and densities. Upon arriving in Mali, both the landscape and the objects he came across surprisingly mirrored the work he had just finished. These images are therefore a cultural echo of the paradoxical research that has become more and more drawn into his work.

Joana Neves

Selected bibliography Gabriel Orozco, Turner, Madrid, 2007. Gabriel Orozco. Photographs, Steidl, Göttingen, 2004. Gabriel Orozco, Centro de Artes Visuais, Coimbra, 2003. Gabriel Orozco. Photogravity, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 2000. Gabriel Orozco, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2000.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 276 23/12/08 17:06:22 276 BESART / GABRIEL OROZCO 277 BESART / GABRIEL OROZCO

Gabriel Orozco

Joana Neves

Rolling Life’s Hand Line, 2003 Chromogenic Process (C-Print), on paper Fuji Crystal Archive · 40.64 x 50.8 cm · Edition 4/5

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 276 23/12/08 17:06:22 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 277 23/12/08 17:06:23 278 BESART / GABRIEL OROZCO

Gabriel Orozco Drawing, 2002 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) on paper Fuji Crystal Archive · 40.64 x 50.8 cm · Edition 1/5 Descending, 2002 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) on paper Fuji Crystal Archive · 40.64 x 50.8 cm · Edition 3/5 Cemetery (View 6), 2002 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) on paper Fuji Crystal Archive · 40.64 x 50.8 cm · Edition 3/5

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 278 23/12/08 17:06:27 278 BESART / GABRIEL OROZCO 279 BESART / LUÍS PALMAA

Luís Palma

Known for his photographic mapping of industrial landscapes, suburban areas and peripheral regions, with the aim of creating a collective awareness of contemporary cultural and historical mutations, Luís Palma (1960, Oporto, Portugal) started exhibiting his works in the mid-1980s, pioneering his approach to these subjects within the Portuguese art scene. From early on Palma sought to explore one of the most flagrant paradoxes in documentary photography: it is valued for its realism, which brings it closer to a wider audience, but it is also classified as something ordinary, considering its immediate impact and apparent ease, which has haunted its position within the context of art. An excellent example of the attention given to the social and urban dynam- ics in the creation of individual and collective memories is the series dedicated to the triad Paisagem, Indústria, Memória [landscape, industry, memory]. It was created with the Museu San Telmo in Donostia, Basque Country, and the Centro Português de Fotografia in Oporto and exhibited in both institutions in 1999. Palma worked on this project with Fernando Golvano, carrying out a photographic survey of the industrial activity in several geographies – including those of the Basque country – through its architectural remains. Palma’s focus on photographic industrial archaeology has evolved into other perspectives, such as the one developed throughout several years under the header Territorialidade [territoriality], a single series of photographs that resulted in 2007 in an exhibition at Galeria Presença in Oporto and the publication of a book with the same title. Territorialidade is derived from questioning of what is territorial or limited to a territory, re-evaluating the very own physical limitations of photography through mapping permeable identities. It continued one of the vast areas of research on urban fragmentation which characterises our times. Palma was recently nominated for the BES Photo 2008 award, which highlights his relevance in photographic practice today.

Lúcia Marques

Selected bibliography Territorialidade, self-published, Oporto, 2007.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 278 23/12/08 17:06:27 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 279 23/12/08 17:06:28 280 BESART / LUÍS PALMAA

Territorialidade, 2002 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) · 120 x 180 cm · Edition 1/3 + 1 AP

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 280 23/12/08 17:06:44 280 BESART / LUÍS PALMAA 281 BESART / LUÍS PALMAA

Territorialidade, 2002 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) · 120 x 180 cm · Edition 1/3 + 1 AP Paisagem, Indústria, Memória, 1999 Digital Chromogenic Print (LightJet Lambda Process) · 180 x 120 cm · Edition 3/3 + 1 AP

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 280 23/12/08 17:06:44 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 281 23/12/08 17:06:57 282 BESART / JOÃO PENALVA

João Penalva

In 1976, João Penalva (1949, Lisbon, Portugal) settled in London to complete a degree in visual arts at the Chelsea School of Art, after having started his artistic career in dance. The dance experience and its relation with memory, desire and notions of rhythm – initially acquired between 1968 and 1976 – was rekindled in the mid-1990s, when he consciously cut his ongoing painting practice short and from thereon dedicated himself mainly to installations and montages of different materials with a narrative undercurrent. Penalva has exhibited his work regularly since the 1980s and received international acclaim in the 1990s. He represented Portugal at the São Paulo (1996), at the Venice (2001) and at the Sydney biennials (2002). The theme that connects all Penalva’s work may be summarised, as suggested by João Fernandes, in the acts of translating, transcribing and transliterating. It is a theme that drives his work, through which he articulates spaces, narratives or documents he comes across and which, through a relation of familiarity and strangeness, he appropriates and integrates into his own language. Kaki (Gauguin) (2006) is a work that represents the effective device of Penalva’s vocabulary – the composition of a text excerpt in dialogue with two images. Text, idiomatic expressions, fictions, facts, music scores, choreographs, film-drawing- photography, changes to the exhibition space, found objects, objects borrowed from private collections, screening of films in cinemas, screening of films in museums with mismatching chairs, ballet bars that support the bodies of those watching a video: all these elements are gathered in mise-en-scènes which depart from a purely theatrical quality by being a structural requirement for the narrative at stake, remaining permeable to the various interpretations of the viewer passing through this linguistic labyrinth.

Maria do Mar Fazenda

Selected bibliography João Penalva, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Oporto, 2005. João Penalva, Electa, Milan, 2001. João Penalva, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, 1999. The Ormsson Collection, presented by João Penalva, Museu da Cidade/Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Lisbon, 1997.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 282 23/12/08 17:06:57 282 BESART / JOÃO PENALVA 283 BESART / JOÃO PENALVA

João Penalva

Maria do Mar Fazenda

Kaki (Gauguin), 2006 Inkjet prints (Piezography and Iris process), mounted on aluminium · 52 x 42.3 cm; 129.3 x 77.3 cm; 77.3 x 127.3 cm · Unique print

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 282 23/12/08 17:06:57 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 283 23/12/08 17:08:15 284 BESART / IRVING PENN

Irving Penn

If we consider his most well-known work as a photographer, Irving Penn, (1917, Plainfield, NJ, USA), brother to the film director Arthur Penn, essentially photographs fashion, advertisements and portraits of famous personalities. It was these strands, along with the production of illustrated magazine covers such as Vogue, which won him worldwide notoriety, creating a true school of elegance and seduction. Nowadays, most of his stylistic solutions are part of the photographic vocabulary. He photographs in the studio. Even during his trips to Mexico, Peru or Morocco, he produced his work in a studio or he took a portable device with him that helped generate images like Peru Quechua (1948), the images of warriors from Dahomey, the current Benin (1967) or portraits from Morocco (1970) and excellent books such as Worlds in a Small Room (1974). His portraits have throughout the world turned into real icons. Classic portraits are those of Spencer Tracy, the Duchess of Windsor, Noel Coward, Marcel Duchamp, Marlene Dietrich, Igor Stravinsky, and Willem de Kooning, produced in the 1980s. His use of natural light in the studio is a recurring trait, along with the neutral background that enable him to mark out clear and precise contour lines, or the use of oblique contexts and tilting perspectives. Their importance is ac- knowledged as having contributed to the American definition of glamour. In the field of publicity his compositions of dead nature have become exemplary, playing with elements of sometimes three-dimensional forms, an example of which is Salad Ingredients (1947). In the 1960s Penn started producing draught compositions of photographic objects with waste, construction materials, bones – what is thrown away and what is common – in rich platinum, therefore focusing on the glamour of form and not just of contents. It is an imaginative and illumi- native exercise, a lot like Irving Penn himself, who in the beautiful work Football Face (2002), allowed an improvised mask to sit in strong contrast to shining skin and hair, translating once more the photographer’s belief in the ability of the photograph to seduce the world.

Maria do Carmo Serén

Selected bibliography Irving Penn. A Career in Photography, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 2007. A Notebook at Random, Bulfinch Press, New York, 2004. Photographs Of Dahomey, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2004. John Szarkowski, Still Life, Bulfinch Press, New York, 2001. Irving Penn. Photographs in Platinum, Marlborough, New York, 1977.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 284 23/12/08 17:08:17 284 BESART / IRVING PENN 285 BESART / IRVING PENN

Irving Penn

Maria do Carmo Serén

Football Face, 2002 Chromogenic Process (C-Print), on paper Fuji Crystal Archive · 66 x 54 cm · Edition of 13

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 284 23/12/08 17:08:17 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 285 23/12/08 17:08:20 286 BESART / SCOTT PETERMAN

Scott Peterman

Scott Peterman (1968, Bellefonte, PA, USA) is a North American photographer known for his production of images that show the pictorial and sculptural character of landscapes and human constructions. Peterman’s work evidences an arduous approach, concerned with ‘know-how’ and the details of photographic art, paying attention to the legacy of artists like Dan Graham, Ed Ruscha or Carl Andre. The relations between architecture, housing and nature appear as transversal themes in his series and compositions that, among other motifs, show mountains, rocky surfaces, cities and strange buildings. In 2002, Scott Peterman presented a series dedicated to ice fishing cabins (ice fishing is a very much appreciated activity in certain areas of the USA during winter) at the Daniel Silverstein Gallery, in New York. At first glance, these are just constructions with a utilitarian purpose that accentuate the solitude of their inhabitants, but the way in which they are shown to us configures them into small minimalist sculptures, or, through the monochromatic tone of snow and ice, even delicate abstract paintings. This interest in documenting the serial character and the geometries of the architectonic shapes is also present in 203B (2005), a photograph belonging to a series on the city, developed in California, São Paulo and Mexico City, among other urban centres. It shows different buildings photographed from above, which seem to be suspended in time and empty. The monumentality of the architecture is transformed into a succession of lines and forms and reaches, and in the relation between shadows and sky, they achieve an almost phantasmagorical aspect. With solo exhibitions in mainly North American institutions and galleries, Scott Peterman participated in the 10th edition of the Venice Architecture Biennial (2006). In 1996 he was awarded the Ward Cheney Memorial Award in the photography category.

José Marmeleira

Selected bibliography Melissa Kurtz, Scott Peterman Monograph, Channel Photographics, New York, 2006. Richard Burdett (ed.), Cities: People, Society, Architecture: 10th International Architecture Exhibition Catalogue, Venice Biennale/Rizzoli, Venice/New York, 2006.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 286 23/12/08 17:08:21 286 BESART / SCOTT PETERMAN 287 BESART / SCOTT PETERMAN

Scott Peterman

José Marmeleira

203B, 2005 Chromogenic Process (C-Print) · 101.6 x 72.39 cm · Edition 2/10

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 286 23/12/08 17:08:21 _BES ART_UK NOR.indd 287 23/12/08 17:08:22 288 BESART / PAUL PFEIFFER

Paul Pfeiffer

During the second half of the 1990s, manipulation, alteration and appropriation of film footage gave rise to a new genre in the visual arts. Paul Pfeiffer (1966, Honolulu, HI, USA) elevated that approach to an almost manic status. The artist himself stated that it can take several months to produce a few minutes of altered film. Unlike other artists of his generation, such as Douglas Gordon who appropriates images without changing them, or Steve McQueen and Stan Douglas who quote cinematic references, Pfeiffer meticulously reworks each frame in his films. In Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2004), one of his most acclaimed works, Pfeiffer digitally deleted all players in a basketball field, except for the one player being followed by the camera. It is however impossible to identify him since his name and number have also been deleted from his T-shirt. ‘I have been selec- tively appropriating and manipulating these images in order to remove the entire contextual detail so that the remaining elements do not form a figuration of what is missing but a figure that is intensified precisely by the lack of a context to place it in.’ Once the entire context is deleted, the only remaining element is a lonely figure within a ghost game before a euphorically applauding crowd. The stadium becomes a parabola of the arena in which the player appears like an allegoric gladiator, the title Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse resonating his successes like a promise from the Book of Revelations. Better known in Portuguese as Apocalipse de João [Apocalypse of John], the book describes the forces threat- ening to destroy Man. ‘Apocalypse’ originally and literally means ‘Revelation’. Paul Pfeiffer has shown his work in institutions such as the Los Angeles Hammer Museum, the New York Whitney Museum of American Art, the London Barbican Arts Centre and the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. His partici- pation in the 2000 Whitney Biennial led to him receiving the first edition of The Bucksbaum Award. Pfeiffer also took part in the 2001 Venice Biennial, among other high points in his career.

Ana Pinto

Selected bibliography Paul Pfeiffer, Hatje Cantz, Ostﬁldern, 2005. Paul Pfeiffer, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2003.

_BES ART_UK NOR.indd 288 23/12/08 17:08:22