In recent years, we have witnessed how the big art fairs such as Art Basel or Frieze have taken over some of the medium sized ones due to, amongst many other factors, their location in major cities. Leaving aside Basel, Paris and London still remain the main locations for the most important art fairs in Europe. This being the case: what about other regions of Europe that may not have the same impact on the art world? And this is where CHART comes in.
CHART is, in essence, a Nordic non-profit organisation that carries out various activities for contemporary culture in this region. One of the most notorious initiatives they have is that they are mainly a publishing platform, but also organise an eponymous art fair. CHART presented its first art fair edition in 2019 and since then they have been working to unite Nordic galleries and facilitate access to international agents interested in collaborating in the promotion of culture.
In the following article we highlighted some of the artists and works presented by galleries that may be new to all of you. As we always do with these short articles, we encourage you to take a look at their websites, familiarise yourself with the artists and, in short, discover new venues outside the main cities, as many of them host interesting programmes and initiatives that are worth following.
Originally from Congo, Sandra Mujinga currently lives and works between Oslo and Berlin. Her Lack series shows images of subjects looking directly at the viewer. Their faces are made up of numerous portraits of different family members and friends of the artist who shared their faces with her in selfie format. From these, Mujinga assembles and distorts them, moving away from traditional visual representation towards an Afrofuturist and posthuman vision of the world which allows her to expose the lack of representation and the future of Black portraiture.
Astrid Kruse Jensen’s images automatically transport you to that intimate, atmospheric, dreamlike space that is sometimes so closely associated with the Nordic countries. In a direct visual association between memory and reality, Kruse Jensen explores the technical possibilities of research through photography and creates these dreamlike images that she executes as if they were paintings. Each of her photographs questions the reliability of the medium and shows how time and place can be dissolved to offer illusion as reality.
Blind Side is a series of photogravures that Trine Søndergaard produced together with BORCH Editions in 2023. Photogravure is a mechanical technique in which an image is etched into a copper plate and then printed with ink on paper. The result of this process is an image that reminisces classical photography with that characteristic mixture of grey tones. There are just five prints in this series and they show an oval stand from different angles. Blind Side refers to previous series in which Søndergaard has explored form, the elements that make up the photographed subject and those hidden aspects of ourselves that are given priority and meaning.
We move slightly from photography to video and performance to find the two-channel work by Danish artist Mia Isabel Edelgart. The “floating peanut experiment” is a scientific test conducted with chimpanzees. The monkeys receive a peanut inside a tube that they cannot access. They have to find a way to get hold of the peanut. This scenario, which may seem very complicated, hides a very simple solution: pour water into the tube so that the peanut rises up. In relation to this experiment, the video addresses several conversations in which a main question arises: Have you ever felt stupid? And it moves into the context of art, how it is presented, its meaning and subsequent judgement.
Lyndon Barrois Jr is a multimedia artist based in New Orleans, US. His practice is a combination of traditional and contemporary techniques associated with the image. From everyday objects to film stills or magazines, Lyndon Barrois Jr deconstructs media to reflect on the language of image production. Bloom presents an image that has been transferred from a fashion magazine to a woven fabric. The piece is not so much about technique as it is about the way in which the image is treated and the means of production involved.
Thora Dolven Balke’s FLOW series intrigued me from the very beginning. They consist of bright silicone moulds decorated with sinuous motifs enclosing enlarged polaroid photographs of an ordinary segment of the artist’s personal life. Each work represents a common scene related to a personal experience of the artist. FLOW is an ongoing series in which Thora Dolven Balke explores how these apathetic sculptural materials can convey tenderness and amplify the underlying meaning of an image.
Hope you enjoyed the article and if you want to discover more about emerging photography. Visit our website for more information and make sure you follow us on Medium!
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Text by:
Juan Blasco — Founder & Curator of Conceptual Projects