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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“As for Wilhelm Reich himself, upon whose ideas and career the film is largely based, today he seems less like a sex radical than like a crypto-conservative without knowing it. Reich’s glorification of the orgasm is actually quite heteronormative and prescriptive, as well as being entirely caught up within the discursive deployment of sexuality-as-liberation, described…
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© Cara Judea Alhadeff, Lost Valley, from the conscious dream project © Cara Judea Alhadeff, kunst-stoff, from the conscious dream project © Cara Judea Alhadeff, Exploratoreum, from Gestation (singles) © Cara Judea Alhadeff, south american tropical room, from gestation project © Cara Judea Alhadeff, art and revolution’s wailing women heads, from gestation project “As a…
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stills from Sam Taylor-Wood’s “Death Valley”, Destricted, 2006 (…) In a society based on the separation and isolation of atomised individuals who are precariously chained together on the basis of a set of neurotic projections (nation, religion, family, etc.) and the practices and institutions that undergird them, it seems unsurprising that Tweedledee will occasionally, perhaps…
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© Sarah Maple, ‘Self portrait with Fried Eggs’, C-Type Print, 2008 © Sarah Maple, ‘I’ve got status anxiety (text)’ – Acrylic on paper collage © Sarah Maple, ‘I’ve got status anxiety’, C-Type Print, 2009 Sasha: When told that the theme of the current No More Potlucks was Ego, you quickly responded, “I have a lot…
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© Sasha Kurmaz, Untitled © Sasha Kurmaz, Untitled © Sasha Kurmaz, Untitled “I consciously seek to avoid the trap of the “author’s style.” The world of art requires us to underscore originality and authorship, a certain manner that will distinguish you from all and make you unique. Today, I think authorship and style are boundaries…
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© Tracey Baran, Run, 2006 © Tracey Baran, Suck and Blow, 2002 “For the last ten years Tracey Baran has focused her camera on herself and her close circle of family and friends who live in Bath, a small town in upstate New York. The result is a visual journal of intimate portraits…
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© Malerie Marder Untitled (fron the Inland Empire serires), 2004 © Malerie Marder Untitled (fron the Inland Empire serires), 2004 “When I was eighteen I was asked to take pictures of a woman named Laura and her lover. She had been having an affair for ten years with a very powerful man. They had learned…
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© Mona Kuhn © Mona Kuhn In a subject frequently used by artists, the nude has become a sort of “rite of passage” to those who observe human body in its most basic form. Mona Kuhn’s approach to this classic theme, while acknowledging her predecessors, creates work that is culturally anonymous with rare references…
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© Hans Bellmer O elemento feminino é ao mesmo tempo um elemento museológico e um objecto de desejo, uma distorção das relações humanas, uma falsa perpetuação da vida, um sonho (pesadelo?) em tempo real. O homem tenta recriar a mulher conforme a sua vontade. A tentativa de preencher uma lacuna afectiva, a satisfação do desejo…
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N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A, 