Minor Tides at Centre De La Photographie Genève

Curated by Danaé Panchaud, the exhibition Minor Tides brings together for the first time the artists Lina Geoushy, Sarah Jade Sullivan, and Farren van Wyk, presenting each of their most important projects to date.

Overview

All three artists focus on portraiture in their photographic practice, using it as a powerful tool for representing collective identity, but also as an instrument for critically re-examining history and reclaiming it for the present.

 Egyptian artist Lina Geoushy devotes much of her work to the history of her country and contemporary Egyptian society. She takes a lucid and critical look at the latter’s current problems, denouncing inequalities and discrimination, particularly those that are systemic and gender-based. Certain times in Egyptian history, particularly the early days of the Egyptian republic, after the end of the British protectorate, are an important source of inspiration for her, both for the artistic effervescence of cinema and photography at that time and for the modernist developments in society. In Minor Tides, she presents her ongoing project Trailblazers. This black-and-white self-portrait work, visually inspired by Egyptian cinema from the 1940s to the 1960s, revisits and reclaims pioneering female figures in her country’s history, from the arts, political activism and law, as well as science and technology.

 German artist Sarah Jade Sullivan has been working for several years on the young generation living in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, a territory with which she has important family and personal ties. This Caribbean state was under British rule until 1979. Her work is dedicated to the new generation of 18-30 year olds and the ways in which these young people navigate a still very present colonial heritage, difficult economic conditions pushing them to emigrate, and hybrid cultural roots. Her project Hairouna consists mainly of portraits of young adults she met during her stays in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, inspired by both art history and the codes of contemporary fashion photography. The project also includes interviews with participants, landscapes, and archival images from the country’s colonial history, providing a nuanced contextualisation to the artist’s photographs.

Farren van Wyk, a South African and Dutch artist, takes the violent and colonial political history of her two countries of origin as the starting point for her project Mixedness is My Mythology. In particular, she re-examines the racist photographic production used to justify the colonisation of the African continent and the specific violence against people of colour, a classification to which she belongs, having been born in South Africa in 1993, just before the end of apartheid. Having settled with her family in The Netherlands at the age of six, she has created a series of portraits with her parents and three brothers that revisit and subvert these images, forming their own personal ode to colour.

Collectively, these projects form the exhibition Minor Tides, a title that alludes to currents that can appear almost imperceptible, but are in fact part of a deep underlying movement, a sign of profound change.