N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A,
a blog about photography by Sofia Silva
What happens inside our homes, in the domestic environment, is something that truly fascinates me, particularly when considering how that intimate environment can be brought into the public sphere, with integrity and respect. In the first months of Nihilsentimentalgia that was pretty obvious. I shared artwork by Esko Manniko, Holly Lynton, Tina Barney, Melissa Ann…
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One of my earliest posts featured a couple of photographs by Malerie Marder and ten years later I am very surprised to go through her work and see that she has been seriously addressing intimacy, not only thematically, as core object of her compositions, but also in what the photographic camera, as a technological medium, does, within…
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Some of my early posts were about the body (its modification, mutilation and sexual dimension). At the time I did a lot of performative photography and self-portrait, so these were pressing issues. It’s difficult to structure the line of thought that arises from revisiting these posts, but three main questions keep lingering in my mind:…
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Being a teacher is an everyday learning experience. We’re challenged in very different ways: either because we need to learn how to teach, either because we need to find ways to potentiate their vision. They trust us and that’s a huge responsibility. When I started at it, 6 years ago, I struggled to find my place, but students…
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Exhibition catalog, 110 × 165 mm, 272 pages, October 2013. A post about a group exhibition themed The Weak Sex – How Art Pictures the New Male, held @ Kunstmuseum Bern from 18.10.2013 to 09.02.2014. © Alexis Hunter, Approach to Fear: XVII: Masculinisation of Society – exorcise 1977. Excerpt from Preface and Acknowledgments Matthias Frehner, Director…
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Trying to make a point with digital cut and paste, here are excerpts of reviews and interviews with collage artist Kalen Hollomon, accompanied by images of his playful work. © Kalen Hollomon © Kalen Hollomon NYMAG: […] Hollomon claims it’s been “embarrassing” to take the iPhone photos that garner him thousands of likes each day…
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Chance having been defined as “the encounter of an external causality and an internal finality,” we have to ascertain whether a certain kind of “encounter” – in this case the essential one, that is, by definition the most subjectivized one of all – can be considered under the angle of chance without our immediately seeming…
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“Nearly a decade later, Fillette would figure prominently in a photographic portrait of Bourgeois by Robert Mapplethorpe. The portrait, in which the (then-) seventy-year-old artist smiles mischievously for the camera while carrying the sculpture in the crook of her arm, was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art as the frontispiece to its catalogue for…
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© Vilma Pimenoff, Untitled (figures-left + beings-right), from The Dark Collection © Vilma Pimenoff, Untitled (beings), from The Dark Collection © Vilma Pimenoff, Untitled, from the series Demoiselles de Paris “Pierce called indexical the process of signification (semiosis) in which the signifier is bound to the referent not by a social convention ( = “symbol”),…
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© Gemma Marmalade, from the series Animals, 2008 © Gemma Marmalade, from the series Animals, 2008 “Animal is a series of photographic portraits of a woman Gemma met on an internet dating/networking website in 2006. Without knowing anything of the artist or her motivations to make contact, the woman engaged in sending photographs of herself…
Read More© Deborah Paauwe, Broken Melody, from the series The Crying Room, 2006 © Deborah Paauwe, Crimson Autograph, from the series Double Dutch, 2002 “Deborah Paauwe’s imagery circulates between art photography and erotica as the artist seduces and assaults the gaze. Paauwe engages with a labyrinthine gaze that Lacan charts as a map full of traps…
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N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A, 