Perceptive Variations

Perceptive Variations, la seconda mostra fotografica del progetto THIS IS ME NOT BEING YOU – TIMNBY.

Comunicato stampa

Milan, Via Circo 1
From 23rd to 26th November 2016

THIS IS ME NOT BEING YOU presents
Perceptive Variations

Curated by Micaela Flenda

vernissage: Wednesday 23rd November, from 6,30pm to 9,00pm

From 23rd to 26th November 2016 the space of Via Circo 1 in Milan will host the second photographic exhibition by THIS IS ME NOT BEING YOU – TIMNBY project, Perceptive Variations, curated by Micaela Flenda in collaboration with The Candy Box, Studio Modulo, GLab and Graficartiere.

In the show-case 9 international photographers: Uldus Bathkiozina, Linda Brownlee, Cristina Coral, Can Dagarlsani, Parker Day, Polly Penrose, Katrin Olafs, Jill Scwheber and Camille Rouzaud.

The central theme on which the exhibition focuses is the relationship between identity and physicality. In front of the multiplicity of existence, we cannot help but ask ourselves an important question: what does it mean "I" today?
Merleau Ponty believed that the sense of subjectivity followed from the perception of the body and the recognition of the identity passed through what we feel, and more specifically through what we perceive: the body has a role as a bridge between consciousness and reality and generates an incredible kaleidoscope of experiences through which the individual has the opportunity to learn about their surroundings and recognize himself.

The perception in the body’s experience thus becomes a place of affirmation of a primordial identity, flesh of the world, prior to any racial, sexual, cultural or social issue.
Through a phenomenological approach every photographer analyzes which are the different modes of perception of the body and what kind of experience the body lives in symbiosis with the surrounding reality, to come to understand how this defines and expresses the most general meaning of identity.

TIMNBY after the inauguration of his exhibition activity in February 2016 during the Milan fashion week and having investigated the facets of the young contemporary fashion photography, is today launching a new challenge: in an era of post-race, post-gender, post- human and post-identity, perhaps we are experiencing post-fashion era when fashion itself becomes a fertile ground for a more personal and intimate creative expression?
If, as Simmel affirmed, during the modern era fashion has taken on a dominant role condensending itself as "psychological trait of our time" *, the ineluctable desire of change and the charm of innovation, and of its own triansence, always on the edge between past and future, brought fashion to become a value judgment. In the contemporary world, technology and social media have created new beings, bodies, icons, fictitious gods, which hold an esoteric demand for a collective identification. The fierce desire of identity is returned urgent and necessary. And if it remained only our body to rewrite the rules of a new identity paradigm?

*Simmel, La Moda (ed.1998), Ed. Oscar Mondadori.

PHOTOGRAPHERS
ULDUS BAKHTIOZINA (Russia) – Eclectic matrioskas, pagan madonnas, dancers, contortionists and lusty sirens are just some of the characters that inhabit the photographs of Uldus Bakthiozina. Fairy-tale scenarios, in reference to the more Russian folk tradition, open to the observer in a succession of dreamlike, suspended between innocence and sin, immaculate and sensual.

LINDA BROWNLEE (Ireland) - The mix between landscape and subject and then between human beings and animals seem to be the style signature of the photographs of Linda Brownlee. Distant places become, in her works, synonyms for melancholy, symbols of secrets, guarded by silent characters and the proud and disarming appareance. Just like new saints, shrouded by the almost religious connotations, the children who live in these shots are facing, solitary, an unpredictable environment.

CRISTINA CORAL (Italy) - "Constraints" to a total integration with the space surrounding them, to look like to be almost sucked, the models of Cristina Coral’s photographs guide the viewer to discover, contemporary and in the contemporary, of two places: the environment and the body, absence and presence. As grown girls, but still engaged in the game of hide and seek, they blend in better with the context in which they are located, giving back in a way that very palpable emotional thrill of being discovered before doing "hide!".

CAN DAGARSLANI (Turkey) - Can Dagarslani, combining his passions for urbanistic and architecture, creates a "new normal" starting from the various forms that the human body can take. His subjects, so consciously anonymous, seem to come from a post-apocalyptic world, trained to lead the viewer into a realm of the absurd in which shapes and colors mark the times and rules. The imagination runs free through the many figured weaves. The fragile human relations lead, in their representation, in a desperate search for identity that enhances the theme of the double. The photographer staged a new perception of perspective, understood as real compositional creation journey, forever once the knowledge of the self.

PARKER DAY (United States) - As an Arcimboldo in the twenty-first century, Hollywood in every way, Parker Day is definitely POP. Her photographs are crisp in palette and at the elemental level, but deep in contents that denounce the squalor of our modern times, personifying the masks that everyday life requires us to wear. Explicit, hard and caricatures, the staged images by the american photographer return alien characters, but they’re not too far from us; dystopian subjects to which we are more and more similar.

KATRIN OLAFS (Islanda) - Katrin Olafs leads observant glances through a cold and difficult landscape, the Icelandic, the same where she was born and in which she finds deep roots for her inspiration. In a "muse" wasteland, woman is the main protagonist. A woman trying to break free from the environment and at the same time aspires to a complete union with it.
In a total perceptive appreciation of the feminine body, the photographer lacks nothing neglect and puts the clothes on the same plane of the other natural elements.
As in a wonderful and difficult dream, we are seeing her icy and composed women to conduct an existential struggle for the conquest of a prehistoric and dented area, only a pretext to confirm their awareness.
POLLY PENROSE (England) – The photographs seem taken in the confines of a dollhouse, but inhabited by a strange creature: herself. In a long seven years performance, the photographer is told in graphic and clean way, tidy and surreal, showing not only the changes suffered by her body because of the passage of time, but trying to use it to conduct a proper search for an adaptation of the latter within the limits of space it occupies. To be read as an intuitive response to the environment, the images of Polly Penrose are the tools to know each other and, at the same time, offer themselves.

CAMILLE ROUZAUD (France) - Camille Rouzaud appreciates street atmosphere, almost left to chance. Her photographic stories describe the life of the street-youngers in a typically urban background. As torchbearers of freedom and childhood dreams not yet broken, the shots of the French photographer conduct a strong energy and a unique dynamic, in which light emerges the courage to want to live an authentic life, despite everything.

JILL SHWEBER (Canada/Israel) - Jill Schweber documents people and their mannerisms into a sequence of expressions, role play and importance given to objects and symbols. All the elements which destabilize and then enchanted. Totally abstract from herself, we can discover a careful photographer able to describe the sense of the sublime so typical of the Sturm und Drang. We observe a small body to grips with a too great nature. As evidence that choose to undergo, preferring a theme of her away, but trying to maintain her unique style; so each of her subjects shall be reactivated as a personal history, a long day, in which totally to be immersed, as strangers in someone's life met by chance, and after that we’ll never see again, but he will remain forever in our thoughts .

BIO
Micaela Flenda is curator and producer. Born in Milan, she graduated in Philosophy at the University of Milan at the Department of Aesthetics, with a thesis on the theme of identity and the power of the image. After her studies she moved to New York and worked with Condé Nast International until 2011 when she decided to return to Italy, continuing her career by following the production of various photo, video and curatorial projects. In 2015 creates THIS IS ME NOT BEING YOU - TIMNBY, curatorial project that aims to promote young contemporary fashion photography.

PARTNERS
The Candy Box
Graficheartiere
Studio Modulo
GLab

THIS IS ME NOT BEING YOU presentS
Perceptive Variations
Curated by Micaela Flenda

23 – 26 November 2016
Vernissage: Wednesday 23rd November, from 6,30pm to 9,00pm
Via Circo 1, Milan, 20123

Time:
23rd November from 6,30pm to 9pm
24th – 25th – 26th November from 11,00am to 7,00pm