Photography Saved My Life at Crux Galerie

With this group exhibition, Crux Galerie brings together ways in which 12 contemporary women artists use photography, in order to reveal marginalised areas, unseen urban cultures, concealed nuances of sexuality, or questions about their identity.

Overview

The works demonstrate solidarity and unconditional acceptance of all aspects of human emotion: shame, fear, pain, trauma, love, tenderness. Some of the works explore the female identity through a fetishistic view and an idolisation of objects and places intertwined with female sexuality. Others bear references to contemporary myths, domestic environments, unseen or imagined landscapes, technical material applications and scientific technologies of representation. Ultimately, the participating artists practice care through their images. Each of these works serves as a recognition of the successes and adversities they encountered on their paths, and act as tokens of their survival, strength and conquests.

Participating artists are Lila Cambani, Maria Cyber, Lara Gasparotto, Nan Goldin, Renate Graf, Maria Mavropoulou, Margarita Myrogianni, Ioulia Panoutsopoulos, Loreal Prystaj, Anna Samara, Marina Velisioti and Chantal Vey.

Lila Cambani’s intimate depictions explore her identity through a fetishist gaze and an idolization of objects intertwined with female sexuality. Maria Cyber’s work is dominated by her spontaneous and honest photographic gaze, throughout her entire journey of accepting her own and her photographic subjects’ identity. Here, she looks at a young woman with an unapologetic look of innocence in lust. Lara Gasparotto shows the care of the everyday through her images. Whether it is documentation of her experience, a scene of her reality or a representation of a relationship, she attempts a journey into different intimate realities.

An advocate for raw depictions of the entire span of emotion, Nan Goldin’s photography includes all kinds of human expressions in a compassionate and honest way. In her landscape depictions, Renate Graf attempts to witness reality and to build her own language of describing the vast cultural variety she encounters.

Maria Mavropoulou employs various digital imaging technologies in her work, in order to highlight and comment on our contemporary ways of perceiving reality through digital environments. Margarita Myrogianni presents staged photographs, each of which bears the characteristics of a still life, with objects and architectural elements in the leading role. Ioulia Panoutsopoulos’ works can be seen as gestural light drawings. The absence  of scale and the intensity of the material raise questions around photography as a medium on an existential level.

Through storytelling and artistic methods rooted in archetypal symbolism and surrealism, Loreal Prystaj immerses (or captures) herself in her photography to explore her subconscious, uncovering the psychological imprint of both natural and domestic environments and revealing internal states of life, death, and rebirth. Thermal imaging technology, which is commonly used to locate missing people, is used in Anna Samara’s work to reveal the tenderness behind the steel armour that conceals (or protects?) the wearer’s femininity.

Marina Velisioti reaches for the unseen, the mystery, the myth, the rumour, by revisiting locations of alleged alien sightings. Chantal Vey explores territories with strong links to (male) histories. Here, she presents a poetic gesture in the form of a still film, based on places from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s travel diary The Long Road of Sand.