“The porous nature of memory”: OpenWalls Arles 2021 offers a captivating look at themes of Then & Now
© Maria Lax, Open Walls Arles 2021 Series Winner.
Source:“The porous nature of memory”: OpenWalls Arles 2021 offers a captivating look at themes of Then & Now
View Gallery
11 Photos
1854 and BJP reveal the two bodies of work, 50 single images and one moving image selected for this year’s award, due to go on show at Galerie Huit Arles between 4 July – 26 September.
From 1854 and BJP, OpenWalls Arles is an international photography award created in collaboration with Galerie Huit Arles. The 2021 edition was an open-call for photographers around the world to respond to the theme Then & Now, compounding two bodies of work, 56 single images and one moving image that ruminate on the changes that time brings, and the lessons to be learned from history — personal, political or otherwise.
From growing up gay in Brazil to the duality of religious sensibility in Nigeria, UFO sightings in Finland to the barbed wire border between Mexico and the USA, the curation – selected by a panel of leading industry figures – will be on show at Galerie Huit Arles between 4 July – 26 September, coinciding with Les Rencontres D’Arles 2021.
Winners – Series
In their own innovative ways, winning series from Maria Lax and Diane Meyer look at the lingering traces of national history in personal consciousness.
Lax’s Some Kind of Heavenly Fire was born when she uncovered her grandfather’s chronicling of a series of UFO sightings in her native Finnish neighbourhood in the 1960s — a time of great socio-economic strife for Northern Finland. “It wasn’t until I read my grandfather’s book that I learned of the incredible stories of supernatural events, bravery and struggle against hardship in what is largely a barren land,” she remarks. The resulting project – a delicate and dynamic amalgamation of photography, family archive and newspaper cuttings – explores how the supernatural anomalies became a conduit for the anxieties of the era.
Meanwhile, Meyer’s delicate artworks in Berlin combine photography and cross-stitching to trace the physical and psychic legacy of the Berlin Wall. The embroidery is made to resemble pixels, and, in some of the images, mirrors the scale and location of the former wall. “I am interested in the porous nature of memory as well as the means by which photography transforms history into nostalgic objects that obscure objective understandings of the past,” says Meyer. “By visually referencing pixels, a connection is being made between forgetting and file corruption.”
Winners – Single Images
Amongst the Single Image winners for this year’s award are meditations on conflict, memory, loss, heritage, and beyond. Ruben Salgado shows a young man as he helps his blind brother swim on the shores of Elmina, Ghana; the first European settlement in West Africa and a major stop on the trans-Atlantic slave route. Ornella Mazzola captures the intimacy and hidden language between women of different generations in her Sicilian family, while Ada Trillo photographs the border built from barbed panels between the United States and Mexico.
The full list of Single Image winners includes:
Ada Trillo
Amiee O’Mahony
Alessando Puccinelli
Alessandro Durini
Alexandra Lapina
Aria Shahrokhshahi
Bartu Kaan
Carla Liesching
Christopher Iduma
Clair Robins
Claudio Ahlers
Daro Sulakauri
Elena Kollatou and Leonidas Toumpanos
Francesca Cirilli
Frederic Aranda
Giovanni Del Brenna
Güzin Mut
Hossein Farinfard
Irene Antonia Diane Reece
Judith Bach
Julia Keil
Kristin Schnell
Lisa Winner
Marivan Martins
Luke Johnson
Marta Navarro-Cabane
Mia Battimell
Michael Joseph
Michaela Nagyidaiová
Miro Kuzmanovic
Nadja Ellinger
Orlando Gili
Ornella Mazzola
Oskar Alvarado
Ruben Salgado
Sarah Douglas
Susan Richman
Tales Yuan
Tanya Sharapova
Thomas Whitworth
Tom Atwood
Tria Giovan
William Mark Sommer
Yasmine Hatimi
Winner – Moving Image
Samba de Lamento is a film by Cecilia Sordi Campos and sits within her broader project, Tem Bigato Nessa Goiaba. Made as a means for the artist to understand the parallels between her migration from Brazil to Australia and her separation from her partner of ten years, the film explores the layers that constitute Campos’s hybrid identity.
OpenWalls Arles 2021 will be on show at Galerie Huit Arles between 4 July – 26 September.
