Material Art Fair 2020

El Cimarrón y su Fandango (2014). As an allegory about the Afro-IndigenousMulato communities in Mexico and its members’ identities journey through the postcolonialism, this series proofs that their past is not merely a description; it is a definition of their present that remains unstable and ambiguous. During Colonia Española a Cimarrón was a fugitive black slave who lived a free life in the isolated corners of society. The fandango is a popular dance characterized by passionate movement. In Mexico it also means rumba, party, feast. Until 1520, the Americas population was comprised by about 1% of African community growing in two centuries to 10%, exceeding the number of the Spaniards inhabitants in current southern USA, Mexico & Central America, which conformed La Nueva España, founded on the Indigenous original civilizations territories. The lack of awareness surrounding the fact that a black community inhabits Mexico amongst indigenous, mestizo and creole, has led to all kinds of debates on sociopolitical and identity-related issues, coalescing in the current struggle for greater visibility and recognition. This series is a political and aesthetically gaze of current times of their identity, a territory celebration and a homage to the America’s Afro root in our identities.

El Cimarrón y su Fandango (2014). As an allegory about the Afro-IndigenousMulato communities in Mexico and its members’ identities journey through the postcolonialism, this series proofs that their past is not merely a description; it is a definition of their present that remains unstable and ambiguous. During Colonia Española a Cimarrón was a fugitive black slave who lived a free life in the isolated corners of society. The fandango is a popular dance characterized by passionate movement. In Mexico it also means rumba, party, feast. Until 1520, the Americas population was comprised by about 1% of African community growing in two centuries to 10%, exceeding the number of the Spaniards inhabitants in current southern USA, Mexico & Central America, which conformed La Nueva España, founded on the Indigenous original civilizations territories. The lack of awareness surrounding the fact that a black community inhabits Mexico amongst indigenous, mestizo and creole, has led to all kinds of debates on sociopolitical and identity-related issues, coalescing in the current struggle for greater visibility and recognition. This series is a political and aesthetically gaze of current times of their identity, a territory celebration and a homage to the America’s Afro root in our identities.

The Middle East concentrates our ancient human history… Qatar was populated in the third millennium B.C. and since then, despite the desert environment, its population has farmed, harvested, fished and built. Like other areas of the world, over the past thirty years, Qatar has enjoyed some of the fastest economic development rates from the entire history. A small handful of new billionaires flourish on the sand dunes while poverty remains as a challenge in the whole world. The appearance of Middle East cities has been transformed rapidly, yet the rest is exactly the same as thousands of years ago. Infrastructure improved as education did with new modern roads and vast crystal skyscrapers with imposible architecture appearing on the horizon like a mirage. It seems that this conspicuous new capitalism heave does not imply much physical labour for the contemporary Qataris, since workers were invited from abroad. Perhaps, though Qatari people drinks from their ancient traditions to create a new identity in a post Neo liberal era yet to be described worldwide. In the seek of a new promised land, what is now the promise?

The Middle East concentrates our ancient human history… Qatar was populated in the third millennium B.C. and since then, despite the desert environment, its population has farmed, harvested, fished and built. Like other areas of the world, over the past thirty years, Qatar has enjoyed some of the fastest economic development rates from the entire history. A small handful of new billionaires flourish on the sand dunes while poverty remains as a challenge in the whole world. The appearance of Middle East cities has been transformed rapidly, yet the rest is exactly the same as thousands of years ago. Infrastructure improved as education did with new modern roads and vast crystal skyscrapers with imposible architecture appearing on the horizon like a mirage. It seems that this conspicuous new capitalism heave does not imply much physical labour for the contemporary Qataris, since workers were invited from abroad. Perhaps, though Qatari people drinks from their ancient traditions to create a new identity in a post Neo liberal era yet to be described worldwide. In the seek of a new promised land, what is now the promise?

“After years of research, Edouatd Taufenbach was able to work with an exceptional collection of anonymous images that director Sébastien Lifshitz has been gathering over several decades… By selecting with obsessive care, coherent corpuses of rare snapshots of leisure, pleasure and desire; he multiplied these silver on gelatin plates to be then fragmented and manually rearranged, sometimes using different scales, in a composition stemming from a rule of mathematical nature [that refers both to digital and the beginning of the cinema]. The latter is specific to each one of the original images which, in a way, impose it. It points to, highlights and amplifies a formal or narrative aspect. The curves of a body here, a gesture there… Conversely it also allows the complete reinterpretation of the image, the invention of a new one: Who would suspect that this bouquet of feminine silhouettes comes from a horizontal image featuring a rather sensible farandole of bathers? In any case Édouard Taufenbach has worked with an open jubilation. —I inject cinema, time and rhythm to my images. The viewer is the one who operates the fi lm strip— he says”. Étienne Hatt, Curator

“After years of research, Edouatd Taufenbach was able to work with an exceptional collection of anonymous images that director Sébastien Lifshitz has been gathering over several decades… By selecting with obsessive care, coherent corpuses of rare snapshots of leisure, pleasure and desire; he multiplied these silver on gelatin plates to be then fragmented and manually rearranged, sometimes using different scales, in a composition stemming from a rule of mathematical nature [that refers both to digital and the beginning of the cinema]. The latter is specific to each one of the original images which, in a way, impose it. It points to, highlights and amplifies a formal or narrative aspect. The curves of a body here, a gesture there… Conversely it also allows the complete reinterpretation of the image, the invention of a new one: Who would suspect that this bouquet of feminine silhouettes comes from a horizontal image featuring a rather sensible farandole of bathers? In any case Édouard Taufenbach has worked with an open jubilation. —I inject cinema, time and rhythm to my images. The viewer is the one who operates the fi lm strip— he says”. Étienne Hatt, Curator

“After years of research, Edouatd Taufenbach was able to work with an exceptional collection of anonymous images that director Sébastien Lifshitz has been gathering over several decades… By selecting with obsessive care, coherent corpuses of rare snapshots of leisure, pleasure and desire; he multiplied these silver on gelatin plates to be then fragmented and manually rearranged, sometimes using different scales, in a composition stemming from a rule of mathematical nature [that refers both to digital and the beginning of the cinema]. The latter is specific to each one of the original images which, in a way, impose it. It points to, highlights and amplifies a formal or narrative aspect. The curves of a body here, a gesture there… Conversely it also allows the complete reinterpretation of the image, the invention of a new one: Who would suspect that this bouquet of feminine silhouettes comes from a horizontal image featuring a rather sensible farandole of bathers? In any case Édouard Taufenbach has worked with an open jubilation. —I inject cinema, time and rhythm to my images. The viewer is the one who operates the fi lm strip— he says”. Étienne Hatt, Curator

“After years of research, Edouatd Taufenbach was able to work with an exceptional collection of anonymous images that director Sébastien Lifshitz has been gathering over several decades… By selecting with obsessive care, coherent corpuses of rare snapshots of leisure, pleasure and desire; he multiplied these silver on gelatin plates to be then fragmented and manually rearranged, sometimes using different scales, in a composition stemming from a rule of mathematical nature [that refers both to digital and the beginning of the cinema]. The latter is specific to each one of the original images which, in a way, impose it. It points to, highlights and amplifies a formal or narrative aspect. The curves of a body here, a gesture there… Conversely it also allows the complete reinterpretation of the image, the invention of a new one: Who would suspect that this bouquet of feminine silhouettes comes from a horizontal image featuring a rather sensible farandole of bathers? In any case Édouard Taufenbach has worked with an open jubilation. —I inject cinema, time and rhythm to my images. The viewer is the one who operates the fi lm strip— he says”. Étienne Hatt, Curator

La Creciente series creates a wildly visual atmosphere, making us see that there is value in rethinking the techniques of photography as a mean to disrupt the all-too familiar patterns of visual thinking that inhabit wider social forms of representation. His aesthetics challenges the viewer’s perception of a subject and its meaning, which is what tends to be forgotten as a more critical aspect of the history of pictorialism”. David Bate. Art Photography. Tate Editions, London.

La Creciente series creates a wildly visual atmosphere, making us see that there is value in rethinking the techniques of photography as a mean to disrupt the all-too familiar patterns of visual thinking that inhabit wider social forms of representation. His aesthetics challenges the viewer’s perception of a subject and its meaning, which is what tends to be forgotten as a more critical aspect of the history of pictorialism”. David Bate. Art Photography. Tate Editions, London.

“Chaskielberg uses very slow exposures on a large-format camera to dislocate the naturalism… in photographs of rural and landscape…carefully lighting and sharply focussing it, balancing and blending artificial and natural light sources… The resulting effect is a combination of focus and blur in effect reconfiguring the old pictorial.

“Loaded with eroticism, romanticism and embitterment alike, Fernando Bayona's staged photographs display a set of individual stories and intimate acts that explore the depths of contemporary universal psychology… In The Life of the Other, Bayona mixes staged and documentary photography techniques to create a collective portrait of images in which the sleaze of violence, pain, madness, jealousy and sexual desire are intertwined with the vulnerability of love, tenderness, passion or beauty. The appearances that arise from this series, comprised by several mise-en-scènes, focus on the ability to generate intrinsic, albeit partial, narratives that come from real stories and interviews… The narrative power of the artist's images is sustained and complemented by impeccable manufacturing and technique. From the preproduction moment, up until the last edition. it is sought that each of the details of framing, lighting, layout and conceptualization be carefully planned, executed and justified. The artist defends the construction of his theatricality through these technical and conceptualization procedures, thus continuing with his constant analysis of human behaviour in which the autobiographical and the reflexive interweave with the religious, the documentary and the political.” Alberto Ríos de la Rosa, Art historian.