This year we will highlight the work of 4 female photographers thinking about women contributions to arts: Carla Cabanas, Jessica Backhaus, Marguerite Bornhauser and Mónica de Miranda.
Marguerite Bornhauser
Marguerite Bornhauser's (1989, Paris) work has been shown at the museum of European Photography in Paris and Paris Photo in 2019, in the streets of Cincinnati for the Cincinnati Art museum, in Arles during the festival of Photography, in Deauville during the Festival Planches Contact, at BETC agency, Agnès B, in the festival MAP Toulouse, in London, etc. Marguerite Bornhauser adds editorial work to her photographic research. Her first book, Plastic Colors, was selected among the finalists of the first book award of Mack books in 2015 and published in 2017. Her book "8" was published by Poursuite in 2018. In 2019 she published Red Harvest with the same publisher. She also collaborates with french and international magazines and newspapers as a photoreporter and portrait photographer as well as a fashion photographer. Red Harvest, Poursuite Editions, 2019, 8, Poursuite Editions, 2018, Plastic Colors, Les Editions du Lic, 2017, Carnet de Résidence du Hameau des Baux, Poursuite Editions, 2017, Fisheye photobook, 2017, 8, Self published, 2016, Festival de créations photographiques à Deauville Edition 6, Filligranes Editions, 2015, Echappées Belles, Edition Diaphane, 2015, Plastic Colors, Self published, January 2015. In 2020 she won the Photo London x Nikon Emerging Photographer of the Year Award.
“The overall effect of Bornhauser’s practice (…) is to remind us of the way in which colour can echo, not only from one image to another, but from one place, or one moment in time, to another. Colour as subject-matter, or rather, colour as a means of producing photographic representations of the real world that surpass the sum of their parts, becomes a kind of psychological projection into or onto the everyday."
Simon Baker (Director, MEP, Paris)
Fujiflex Prints
120x80 cm.
Fujiflex Prints
60x40 cm.
“The overall effect of Bornhauser’s practice (…) is to remind us of the way in which colour can echo, not only from one image to another, but from one place, or one moment in time, to another. Colour as subject-matter, or rather, colour as a means of producing photographic representations of the real world that surpass the sum of their parts, becomes a kind of psychological projection into or onto the everyday. In a sense this is why Bornhauser has so much in common with writers like Hammett, painters like Henri Matisse, or theorists like Gaston Bachelard, each of whom were sensitive to colour in their own unique and personal way. More in common, one could say, with pictorial or linguistic abstractions derived or drawn from colour, than with other photographers for whom colour is simply a technical issue to be resolved and exploited. In her most recent work, moreover, Bornhauser has sought to engage not only with colour within the visual field but in the process of producing photographs as objects in the world. From sumptuous Cibachrome prints (for many, the holy grail of colour photographic reproduction) to new experiments with moving image and printing on fabrics, Bornhauser has taken the practice of re-showing the world around us as a brighter and more beautiful place to the next level in the terms by which her images occupy space, while never straying far from the unique truths at the heart of the way that only she sees things."
Simon Baker (Director, MEP, Paris)
In the series "When Black is Burned", in exhibition at the fair, Marguerite Bornhauser wanders through reality looking for narratives among seemingly random scenes showing them as a play between shadows and textures and where objects and bodies merge to almost become abstract.
Fujiflex Prints
60x40 cm.
Fujiflex Prints
60x40 cm.
Fujiflex Prints
60x40 cm.
Carla Cabanas
Carla Cabanas’s (Lisboa, 1979) work revolves around the methodologies of stretching the defined borders of the photography medium while dwelling on the issues of collective and cultural memory. She has presented her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions including MAAT Museu de Arte, Arquitectura e Tecnologia, Lisbon (2020); Balcony Contemporary Art Gallery, Lisbon (2020); Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon (2020); Aa Collections Gallery, Vienna (2019); Sternstudio Gallery, Vienna (2019); Arquipélago – Centro de Artes Contemporâneas, Ribeira Grande, Açores (2019); Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisboa (2019); Biennale de l’Image Tangible, Paris (2018); Grimmmuseum, Berlin (2018); Centre D’art Contemporain, Meymac, France (2018); GlogauAIR, Berlin (2018); Fundação Eugénio de Almeida, Évora (2017); Gallery Carlos Carvalho – Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon (2017); Castello Visconteo Di Legnano, Milan, Italy (2017); Panal 361, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2017); Ox Warehouse, Macau, China (2016); Carpe Diem Arte e Pesquisa, Lisboa (2015); Lisbon Municipal Photographic Archive, Lisbon (2014); City Museum, Lisbon (2014); 7ª Biennial São Tomé e Príncipe (2013); National Museum of Natural History and Science, Lisbon (2012); Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid (2012) and CCCB – Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (2009).
Her work is held in prominent collections, including the National Gallery of Art Washington, DC; Luso-American Development Foundation (FLAD), Lisbon; LPS Collection (Stanislas y Leticia Poniatowski), Colección Kells, Santander; PLMJ Foundation Collection, Lisbon; Novo Banco Art Collection, Lisbon; Banque Privée Edmond de Rothschild Europe, Lisbon; Lisbon City Hall, Lisbon; Figueiredo Ribeiro Collection, Lisbon; Marín Gaspar Collection, Lisbon; José Carlos Santana Pinto Collection, Lisbon; and other private collections.
Intervention and gold leaf (22K) on color photographs, 44 x 48,8 cm (framed)
“I don’t trust myself when I’m sleeping II”, in addition to scratching the images with the scalpel, Cabanas experiments with gold leaf, inspired by the Japanese restoration technique Kintsugi, about which she acquired practical knowledge in 2017.
Intervention and gold leaf (22K) on color photographs; 44 x 48,8 cm (framed)
Intervention and gold leaf (22K) on color photographs; 44 x 48,8 cm (framed)
The project “I don’t trust myself when I’m sleeping”, currently with two parts, gives continuity to the artist’s enquiries about the places of memory and photography in the construction of identity narratives. Using photographs from family albums bought at flea markets, as is already customary in her practice, the artist finds in them the ideal support to mould the images and characters of her personal history, images that cross the barriers of sleep and wakefulness, experience and memory. In addition to the usual affection with which Carla Cabanas treats the anonymous photographs that she uses in her work, this time she also introduces irony and satire, in the way she stripes and obliterates parts of the original image, populating them with new characters and new senses.
“I don’t trust myself when I’m sleeping II”, in addition to scratching the images with the scalpel, Cabanas experiments with gold leaf, inspired by the Japanese restoration technique Kintsugi, about which she acquired practical knowledge in 2017. Kintsugi is a century-old method of ceramic repair, which consists of gluing the broken piece with Urushi natural lacquer and covering the cracks resulting from the gluing with gold. The aim, in making these cracks evident, is to give value to faults and physical changes in objects, caused by time or accidents.Carla Cabanas’ artistic work is permeated by her wonderings about how we come to build our own identity; how experiences, even the more prosaic ones, are inscribed in the fabric of our existence and how memory consolidates our personal narratives.
Intervention and gold leaf (22K) on color photographs; 44 x 48,8 cm (framed)
Mónica de Miranda
Mónica de Miranda (Porto, 1976) is an artist and researcher, her work is based on themes of urban archaeology and personal geography. She works in an interdisciplinary way with drawing, installation, photography, film, video and sound, in its expanded forms and in the boundaries between fiction and documentary.
She exhibits regularly and internationally since 2004 being nominated for Prix Pictet Photo Award (2016), Novo Banco Photo Prize (2016) and EDP New Artist prize (2019).
Her solo exhibitions include: “Taxidermy of the Future” (Museu de História Natural de Luanda, Angola, 2020), “Tomorrow is Another Day” (Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisboa, 2018),“Panorama” (Banco Económico de Luanda, Luanda, 2019;“Hotel Globo” (Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado, Lisboa, 2015), “Arquipélago” (Galeria Carlos Carvalho, Lisboa, 2014).
Her collective exhibitions include: Fotofest Biennial 2020, Houston, EUA, “Utopía y Distopias en el paisaje contemporáneo”, (MAAC, Guayaquil, Equador, 2019), “Taxidermy of the Future” (Bienal de Lumbumbashi, Congo, 2019), “EDP New Artists Prize”, (MAAT, Lisbon, Portugal, 2019), “Fiction and Fabrication. Photography of Architecture after the Digital Turn”, (MAAT. Lisbon, Portugal, 2019), “Doublethink: Doublevision” (Pera Museum, Istambul, Turkey, 2017), “Daqui Pra Frente” (CAIXA Cultural. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), “Le jour qui vient" (Galerie des Galeries, Paris, France, 2017), “Arte Africana Contemporânea e Estética das Traduções” (Bienal de Dakar, Dakar, 2016); “Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporânea de Casablanca” (Casablanca, Marrocos, 2016), “Addis Foto Fest” (Addis Abeba, 2016), “Telling Time” (Rencontres de Bamako Bienal Africaine de la Photographie edição 10 éme, Bamako, 2015); “Ilha de São Jorge” (14ª Arquitectural de Veneza, 2014); “Linha de Armadilha” (São Tomé e Príncipe Biennial, 2013), “Do you Hear Me?” (Estado do Mundo, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa, 2008);
Her work is represented in private and public collections such as Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Portugal, Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado (MNAC). Portugal, Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa. Portugal and Centro Cultural de Lagos.
Inkjet printing on cotton paper, 80x240 cm
"The photographs of women dressed in black with bare feet, as in “Untitled, from the series City-Scapes” (…) are relevant in the sense that this figure transmits the idea of osmosis with the burned soil in which its own regeneration survives the desertified landscape.” João Silvério
Inkjet printing on cotton paper, 70 x 105 cm
"The work of Mónica de Miranda can be understood as an agent that continually reconnects artistic processes with the transitory condition of the spectator. Regardless of the themes she investigates, or of socio-political reflections that strap in her identity a real and emotional sense with the place and history of those who inhabit it, her works contain part of her self-referential experience but not alway autobiographical, because it is not a testimony of the journey but of someone who recognizes herself in the transition and in the territorial change. (…) The photographs of women dressed in black with bare feet, as in “Untitled, from the series City-Scapes” (…) are relevant in the sense that this figure transmits the idea of osmosis with the burned soil in which its own regeneration survives the desertified landscape.” João Silvério
For Paris Photo, Mónica de Miranda focus on communities in exclusion that live in the outskirts of the city. By presenting them in staged movements she shows a feeling of alienation in the characters in contrast to the space in which they are inserted.
Inkjet printing on cotton paper, 80x240cm