Mathieu Pernot’s work analyzes the relationship between the individual and the power exerted by different social institutions. The artist uses the photographic medium at the same time that he questions its normative effects. What is particularly interesting is that his work does not only offer an état de lieux but each project could also seen as a piece of active resistance. Pernot’s opposition is silent, far from touching on the spectacular. It is solid and advances progressively.

Selected by Marta Daho on August 5, 2010

Kathrin Kur’s photographs of places and common situations are strictly documentary and yet the way she presents them subtly prevents the viewer from making an immediate interpretation of what they see. The places photographed include empty television studios (Smoke and Mirrors), Shooting Ranges or as here presented, the scene of a (Mediterranean ferry loading) quay at night. Parklife is an exploration of a single image. A virtual camera forces us to look the image at a slow and punctuated pace thus creating a certain suspense. Parklife can also be considered as a brilliant mise-en-scene that touches upon one of Photography’s core issues: its fragmentary nature.

Selected by Marta Daho on August 1, 2010

Herbert Weber is interested in dismantling some traditional codes of lecture and to reveal the unsettling factor that pervades our perception of a photographic image. Like an outstanding disciple of G.K. Chesterton, Weber creates sophisticated parodies related to some of the most conventional aspects of the photographic act. The most obvious: undermine the certainty with which we tend to differentiate between documentary and staged photography. In Weber’s work, both converge in a cheerful and unusual way.

Selected by Marta Daho on July 30, 2010

This series of images accompanied by text is part of a larger installation called “Je suis la frontière” (I am the border) which encompasses a growing archive of audio and visual documents that explore the complexity of living in the US – Mexico borderland. The whole archive constitutes a personal cartography of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, two cities that are at the same contiguous but divided by four international bridges. In her work, Vera seeks to challenge the limited and biased information that the media gives us about certain places in the world. She believes in approaching those places by listening to individuals, following their steps, and walking on the streets. She thus hopes to create a personal cartography of a place and to give presence to the voices and life stories behind the sometimes overwhelming statistics.

Selected by Marta Daho on July 27, 2010

Aleix Plademunt Perez: My work reflects on different social attitudes, analyzed through the landscape. I am interested in the landscape when it has a direct relationship with the social, with us. I’m interested in analyzing the landscape from a present perspective, from the moment of history in which I am living. I’m questioning why I have found the landscape in this way, how we use it, how we move about in it, and what we understand by the term ‘landscape’. Dubai has had the privilege of being able to create a city from scratch, from nothing. The city has the space and money to enable it to realize the dreams of a society. The city speaks of the desires, hopes and habits of today’s society. A city was built by appropriating Western symbols and taking them to the extreme, to the limit. The result is a thematic and fictionalized city which in many cases borders on the absurd.

Selected by Marta Daho on July 19, 2010

Acapulco is a place where you can’t say no. Elvis Presley said it this way in a song dating back to 1963 that had become popular a year earlier after the release of the movie Fun in Acapulco. In this installation project, the Mexican artist Pablo López Luz not only sheds light upon the topographic vision of different architectural structures and urban landscape but also to the classical imagery of a place full of glamour that has been vividly immortalized by the cinema and advertising industries.

Selected by Marta Daho on July 15, 2010