Credits
Models · ELENA and LORENA at MONSTER BADD and FABRIZIA at VISION STREET
Photography · ARIANNA GENGHINI
Fashion · ALICE MANFRONI
Casting · GIOVANNI at VISION STREET CASTING
Makeup · ELENA GAGGERO
Hair · ERISSON MUSELLA at BLEND MANAGEMEMENT
Fashion Assistant · VIRNA MARCHESE
Makeup Assistant · EDOARDDO BACIGALUPI
Credits
Model · ALI HONCHARUK at D MODEL AGENCY
Photography · OTTAVIA DI LEO
Stylist · LINDA DEGIORGI
Makeup and Hair · CINZIA TRIFILETTI
Set Designer · BEATRICE ISABELLA BONETTO
Fashion Assistant · DILETTA POLIMENA
Set Designer Assistant · SARA SACCHETTO
Credits
Model · ANNEMR at THE WALL
Photography · ANTONIO DICORATO
Fashion · DONATELLA MUSCO
Casting · MICHELE BISCEGLIA
Hair Stylist · HENZO LORUSSO
Make up · SARA DE CHIRICO
Fashion Assistant · LAURA BELLINI
Production · ANDREA C RAVALLESE
Credits
Models · ULIANA and QUAYE at ELITE, NANDINI at IMG and MUMIN at 16PARIS
Photography · ARTHUR DELLOYE
Fashion · NOEMIE BELTRAN
Makeup · SALOI JEDDI
Hair · ANITA BUJOLI
Casting · OCÉANE LUCAS
Production · JUDITH HAIK at LA MULTINATIONALE
Photography · Assistant KLEBER DE QUAY
Pan Daijing is an artist and composer whose work defies easy categorisation. Earlier this year, Daijing released her third album, Tissues – an hour-long record taken from the artist’s performance piece of the same name that was shown at the Tate Modern back in 2019. The work was conceived as an opera in five acts, combining Daijing’s long-standing exploration of electronic music. In a Zoom call from Berlin where Daijing lives, the artist jokes that Tissues almost predicted the pandemic – not least because of its title, but also as a performance about hopelessness and a pervading sense of despair that seems to categorise the world we live in now. As an exploration of the operatic voice, Tissues is not immediately like Daijing’s earlier albums, 2021’s Jade and Lack (2017), which are more akin to noise music – with electronic sounds evoking the eery, isolating hum of an industrial landscape, interspersed with distinctively, sometimes uncomfortably, human guttural sounds.
Daijing has performed, as a musician, at a string of Europe’s best festivals and at other venues, whilst also being commissioned, as an artist, to work with museums and art institutions – where sound and music remain central components within these pieces. Below, we discuss the boundaries of her work, drawing on the German composer Wagner’s notion of Gesamtkunstwerk, or the ‘total work of art’. It seems, to me, a term that aptly describes Daijing’s practice, without putting too much of a label on her, or her work. In fact, it is through music and art that Daijing aims to transcend categorisation in itself. By using music, sound, light, movement and design, Daijing creates work that explores a hybrid realm of what we often want to label as either ‘music’ or ‘art’, and thus allows the separate components to be interwoven and to communicate with one another.
Daijing describes a lifelong fascination with the human voice – as a child, she says, she would close her eyes and listen to someone’s voice, at school for example, and try to guess who was speaking. “It’s an interest I’ve always had,” Daijing explains, “and when you look for inspiration in life and in work, you always go to places that you’ve always felt fascinated by.” In essence, Daijing’s work is inextricably woven into the fabric of the space, the environment, the context, in which it is experienced – whether that is in a gallery setting, in a club, or alone – listening to her records in solitude.
NR: As a starting point, you recently worked with the Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong on a series of new works, and as part of that, the piece Echo, Moss and Spill included elements of live performance. Was that your first live performance since the pandemic?
PD: Throughout the pandemic I was still working at a steady pace and Echo, Moss and Spill was my second exhibition-based work of the pandemic. Before that, I created a new work for Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art. But that was a little different, it was mainly installation-based work on view for three months. Echo, Moss and Spill was a commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary as a performative environment in the format of a solo exhibition, alongside video work, sound and installation work. Alongside this, I was also commissioned by the institution for another work, One Hundred Nine Minus, which was a single sound installation. During the pandemic a lot of work had to be shifted because, with performance, there’s a lot of interaction that didn’t work with COVID rules, so I was quite grateful that, in Hong Kong at the time, there were almost no COVID cases. I caught a good moment when people were more relaxed about the situation; we could have more human interaction. And the performers didn’t have to wear surgical masks, we designed the costumes to have masks as part of the wardrobe. But even playing shows was strange because, right after the first lockdown when everything was still closed, there were still small things happening here and there. And when I was back in Europe in the summer last year, there was two, three, months where I was able to also make new work. I also did a few concerts myself, as well as show some of my composition work, travelling with an opera singer. Of course, COVID did influence my work significantly, but I am grateful to have been able to have continued working while so many others were forced to stop.
NR: Back in 2019, Tissues, an exhibition of performance work, took place at the Tate Modern – so just before the pandemic kicked off. Why did you release an hour-long snippet of Tissues as an album, which is obviously a different medium to how it was first performed?
PD: The idea of archiving performance work and putting pieces into different formats, to extend the lifespan, is always a part of my idea for a project. But, with Tissues, music is very prominent because this piece specifically touches on the idea of classical opera, the philosophy of making an opera, and the idea of music as an art form. The listening experience is also prominent in this piece, and I think, for me, making records is important.
“I think it’s important to have this dialogue with listeners, so they can have a piece of me that they can revisit, because in performance-based work, or ‘live art’, very often it’s just a moment.”
Of course, you can still revisit your memory, something I often call a performative relic. But sound-based work is very specific. With my first record, Lack (2017), maybe it’s a weird comparison but it’s kind of like a thesis written after a long period of research. It was a display of certain ideas I was exploring, summarised. And then, Jade (2021) was like a personal journal – sharing an intimate part of myself with strangers, which brings me closer to them. And they can listen to it without bias, without assumption, and I found that quite romantic. The performance of Tissues had limited capacity, and it was also exhibited alongside another piece, a day exhibition called The Absent Hour – so there’s this idea of seeing an operatic performance at night, and in the day, you’re coming to see the exhibition. I did feel that the experience of Tissues had its own momentum, that it could live longer. It was only really those who happened to be there for the performance who have a piece of that memory, but it’s also nice to be able to let this memory have a new life. So, the recording is a totally different piece to Tissues, as an artwork, but it’s an interesting way to have it archived. And personally, for me, I think Tissues was something I spent a really long time working on, as a chapter of my exploration of operatic vocalisation, so this is a way for me to give this a nice summary.
NR: The archiving side of what you’re saying is really interesting, and as an extension of this, how do you want your audience to engage and arrive at your work – considering that live performances are more grounded in the memory, whilst with the record you have the physical copy, or a stream on your computer? It’s a very different way of experiencing it.
PD: I think it’s also interesting that a record is very accessible. I think a lot of people know me through my music, which is natural because you can find it on the internet, and you can listen to it. It allows immediate engagement, and can be very personal, which brings a longer life to the performance work that existed in the past.
NR: How much of Wagner’s idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk also inspires your work?
PD: I wouldn’t consider this concept an inspiration, but understandably people have often related this concept to what I do because I’m involving so many different aspects in my work, acting simultaneously as composer, choreographer, director, designer and performer. Especially at the beginning when I was exhibiting more of my art practice, people really questioned whether it is music or art, or what does this stand for? But I don’t separate my music practice or art practice; for me they are my artistic practice as a whole. That being said, it is also important to acknowledge that, even though most of my artworks have elements of sound, and are centred around the idea of music, it’s a totally different creative process and outcome, as well as scale of production, than when I make music work. So, though I’m not someone who aspires to be something or someone, or do a particular type of work, I do feel that how the idea of total art is used in Wagner’s work is in line with how I feel towards my work. The idea of total art is also quite often used in architecture, when architects make buildings and do the interior design – and later, the Dadaists talked about it too. When I’m writing, I don’t think I’m just writing with music or writing with words. I don’t feel like I’m just choreographing the movement; I’m also choreographing the space.
“I’m not just building an installation; I’m also building the environment. This just comes naturally from the beginning.”
NR: On a practical level then, how do you envision the way sound, space and movement work within a performance?
PD: In my practice all these different elements come together in an unbiased way. It’s about how sound, space, movement and visual artwork combine to create a narrative and express an idea. I’m fascinated by the musicality of space, or the rhythm of speech. But it’s the idea of music that’s usually at the beginning of making a work. And of course, after that, it becomes much wider. Over the past few years, playing concerts has become a smaller part of my practice, because creating these large-scale projects is a demanding process that requires time and focus. But I do still find that it’s important because I find the process of making music live, sharing it with an audience and having a very vulnerable moment on stage is an important way of researching certain ideas or testing materials. And it can be unpredictable; I’ve learned a lot as a musician, this understanding of certain moments of interaction and the idea of having an audience in the space.
NR: How do you negotiate between, say, organic sounds that are made by the human body, versus the artificial or manufactured sounds?
PD: It’s interesting because I often think about it when I’m making work. I like exploring the limits of the human mind or, you know, working with the idea of the extreme, and challenging the extremes within us and the world, which also comes from a place of vulnerability and fragility. At the same time, paradoxically, it’s also about power; the human voice is magic because every person’s voice is unique. A voice reveals sensitive and detailed information about a person, and that’s something I found really fascinating and I like to collect this information. And this is why I also find opera singing to be a strong instrument because there’s a stillness and an athleticism. At the same time, it’s similar to noise music; it’s like extreme amplification but through the human lungs. There’s a kind of power to it because it’s impressive that sound is being generated by an organic being. And I found this quite interesting because I have the same relationship with the analogue synthesisers I use. It’s kind of like a dance. Of course, these are sounds made by a machine, but when I hear my own recordings, I can hear how I felt when I was touching those knobs or those wires. It reveals the language of choreography, so it is a dance with the machine; machines are cold and dead, but humans playing them give it life. So,
“I found this relationship between the voice and machine to be very intertwined and they have very natural, strong connection.”
NR: In a previous interview you discussed how noise can be therapeutic, and I wondered how you found the periods of lockdown which seemed to be characterised by silence and a lack of noise outside. Did the absence of sound affect the way you worked?
PD: I like the idea of the absence of sound because it’s that that triggers your imagination. And it’s actually really hard to find that in everyday life; I don’t often listen to music because I can’t handle music as background noise. When I listen to a good piece of music, it gets my full attention and all of my sensors are triggered, so I’m really focused. I listen to music really quietly – so it’s funny because whenever I play music, people always ask for it to be louder, but when things are quieter you are forced to pay more attention to your senses. It’s a more concentrated form of listening. And I think, now, when we talk about noise in the world, it’s this kind of balance of the volume that is the problem. Certain sounds are too dominant and certain frequencies take over. I think the darkness of the time we’re in, and there has been darkness in every period of history, but maybe something’s overtaken too much.
You’re talking about noise in everyday life, but when it comes to what I was saying about the therapeutic nature of noise, I guess that comes down to the definition of ‘noise’. If we’re talking about the therapeutic nature of like noise as a music expression, silence, for me, is considered noise as well. It’s abstract.
“I think silence is as confrontational as a very strong soundwave.”
That’s what makes a great piece of noise music. And I don’t like confrontation that is forceful, but confrontational in that it feels like an encouragement. When I encounter a piece of work like that, it’s therapeutic because it helps me, it invites me to generate a certain direction. I think it’s very therapeutic because I think that’s what therapy does in general for people; no one can solve all your problems, they can only invite you to have a dialogue with yourself. I think it’s important to be honest with yourself, and this is what I want to achieve in my work as well.
NR: That makes me want to turn back to Tissues and how, as an hour-long one-track record it demands you to listen to it in its entirety.
PD: Music has the potential to provoke emotional, physical and imaginative responses, encouraging the listener to explore places they wouldn’t usually visit. But it takes time for this effect to surface and to feedback. I think about what I could possibly trigger through this listening experience, and when you’re talking about how you cannot go in and out of Tissues, it’s very much on purpose. Sometimes, I want the work to be a bit demanding so that it’s not so easy to digest. I don’t shy away from this kind of intensity in my work – maybe it’s not always pleasant, but that’s also fine. Tissues in its recorded form can only do so much compared to the experience of the performance. But this record does contain some of the spirit of the work, but it needs to be listened to in full to really come close to that experience. With the performance,
“it’s about the choreography, the installation, the landscape of lights – the darkness and the brightness, and all of that comes together. “
So, when you’re listening to it, it’s much denser and more compressed and, in a way, almost less distracting. When someone listens to Tissues, it’s a moment of solitude.
NR: As a final point, then, I wanted to ask you about your live performances and how important site specificity is to you?
PD: From the very beginning, even when I was just playing concerts, I’ve always considered how architecture and space are important for me. I would turn down certain shows because it didn’t have an energy of, you know, I don’t feel inspired by the space. All of my work is site specific because
“it’s a big concern when it comes to making an experience-based work; the musicality of the space, the poetics of the space, is a very dominant element of how we encounter one another and how we encounter something.”
You cannot just hang something on the wall and think that is the only thing you’re looking at. I think, for the kind of work I do, it’s impossible. So, in this sense, I want to work with space through a 360-degree perspective to create a work that an audience can inhabit, to expand this kind of experiential process. With Tissues, the idea was to consider the Tanks as a sleeping giant, and the work is awakening it. The visual aspect of Tissues was to trigger the sensation that the space is moving, that it’s breathing, and that we are not just in an oil tank – it’s a gateway to a bigger world. Right after Tissues, I created a new work Dead Time Blue, featuring three opera singers and five dancers [in the atrium of] Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin in early 2020. The idea of the work was to make the whole space feel like a lung making sound, breathing, and singing. I think most of my sound installation work is about the operatic voice and the acoustic nature of the space as a way to make it feel like the whole building is singing. And, of course, there are the visual aspects – the movement, the dance, it all comes together into much more of a live experience. It’s important when I’m working to find a space I feel inspired by, and work to awaken the beauty in that environment.
Credits
Talent · PAN DAIJING wears BOTTEGA VENETA throughout
Photography · NINA RAASCH
Creative Direction · JADE REMOVILLE
Fashion · FABIANA VARDARO at COLLECTIVE INTEREST
Set Design · KRISTIN BAUMANN
Makeup · SABINA PINSONE
Hair · KOSUKE IKEUCHI
Fashion Assistant · ALEIX ILUSA LOPEZ
Location · RAW STUDIOS
Credits
Models · DUOT AJANG at MUSE NYC and MEDOUNE GUEYE at NEXT
Photography · BRENT CHUA
Fashion · JUNGLE LIN
Grooming · YUKIE YAMASAKI
The photographer Jenevieve Aken is a storyteller. Though Aken often turns to self-portraiture, her work is never merely autobiographical. Rather, she takes on the role of both subject and photographer to tell stories that others recognise and see themselves in. As well as using her own experiences as the basis of her projects, Aken also reinterprets the stories of others, fictional (in Great Expectations, she fashions herself as ‘Miss Aken’, a play on Dickens’s Miss Havisham) and real. Her series, Sanctuary (2017), for example, sees Aken delve into the story of Elvira Orlandini who was raped and murdered in her home village of Palaia, Italy, in 1947. As Aken explains in her interview with NR, she was taking part in an artist residency in the village when she learned of the brutal tragedy of Elvira. Through a series of black and white images, Aken conjures up the spirit of the murdered woman, granting her a second chance at life. For Aken, the series is not just about Elvira, however; by depicting herself as defiant – and, crucially, alive – Aken seeks to shift the story away from victimhood to a tale of survival. As Aken explains of the series on her website, the despicable nature of assault on women’s bodies is shown “naked and exposed for the viewer to feel and see, to experience the vulnerability of women.”
In her first photography series, The Masked Woman (2014), Aken explores the complexity of navigating womanhood in Nigeria, where she is from. The photographer plays with the depiction of an independent, professional woman (which Aken, herself, is), and in doing so, circumvents the male gaze and the stigmatization of sexually free women. In some ways, Great Expectations (2016) is a mirror reflection of that first series in which the character of ‘Miss Aken’ spends her life, jilted and still wearing in her wedding dress, at home – forever in limbo. But if these series grapple with the degrees to which women are free to choose their futures, Aken’s series, Monankim (2017), highlights the absence of choice (and voice) that comes with entry into womanhood. Here, Aken (this time, not subject, only photographer) shines a light on the rituals of female genital mutation – the series takes its name from the word used to refer to the process by the Bakor people, a group of minority tribes from Cross River State, Nigeria. By depicting young women preparing to undergo the highly stigmatised procedure, Monankim is a reminder to Aken, born into one of the Bakor tribes, of the ritual she was able to avoid. In essence then, Aken’s work shines a light on the balancing acts that many try to navigate; the illusion of freedom is, oftentimes, just that.
NR: As a photographer and storyteller, what are some of the key aspects, features and details that inspire you to create a project around a particular story?
JA: I am constantly inspired by what I read, what I see, what I hear from different people and their experiences. I also get inspired by what is happening around me and my experiences; sometimes I get inspired just by myself, in my solitude. I guess that is what inspires me to create a relevant project around a particular story.
How do you find the stories that you focus your work on? Especially in the case of Elvira Orlandini, how did you find out about her life and decide to create a self-portrait project around it?
I am constantly researching, reading and listening. I am always fascinated by stories – I think that is what helps me to find ideas to tell stories. Especially in the case of Elvira Orlandini’s story that I was told in an artist residency I was involved in Italy, in a village called Palaia in Tuscany. I lived there for one month. I heard and listened to Elvira’s tragic story about how her beautiful life was cut short by an unknown killer and how her ghost still roams the village and in the bush. And I also saw her grave by the roadside where her body was found, which was close to where I stayed. Elvira’s story dominated my mind, and that inspired me to create a story around her through self-portrait performance. Elvira’s story still resonates and [like her case], this is still happening to women around the world, begging or negotiating for their life.
“Some who are dead like Elvira’s spirit still linger on earth, looking for justice.”
In your work, especially The Masked Woman, you are both the subject and the viewer/producer – how do you navigate the representation of gender and identity by playing both roles on either side of the camera?
It wasn’t easy navigating this and playing both roles on either side of the camera. In The Masked Woman, which happened to be my first self-portrait series project as a young photographer, I was still navigating with my lens and how not to be passive or overlooked as a show-off or being sensual. Rather, I followed my intuition, and I chose to capture the attention of the viewer to avert the overall male gaze by facing it head on with my own actions and choices that explore the representation of gender and identity through a performative lens.
In the series Great Expectations, you are the character of ‘Miss Aken’, whose married life you imagine. Do you create detailed back stories for your characters in order to take on their role? And how do you connect with these characters?
The Great Expectations series is a reference to the iconic novel by Charles Dickens, and I was inspired by the eccentric character of Miss Havisham. I was connected and drawn to the effect that her having been jilted at the alter had on her character, and how this affects wider society. That inspired me to play the role of ‘Miss Aken’ through self-portrait performance, where I model myself alongside the character of Miss Havisham by reinterpreting and (re)creating the story of Great Expectations
“in a contemporary African society, addressing the huge emphasis placed on marriage as an institution, where happiness, love, friendship are all afterthoughts; marriage first.”
In what way does storytelling allow you as the storyteller to engage with the real-life issues that inform your work? How did you decide to approach social commentary through an artistic style?
I think for me it’s about the location of the idea; if I am able to trace how I have come about a narrative that I am obsessing about, then I find that I am able to map the story and give it honesty and approach it competently. For example, with the story about Female Genital Mutilation, Monankim, I am eternally grateful that my parents decided not to subject me to this trauma; I am aware that it was common in my hometown. I knew many young girls and women that were scarred in my community as part of this ritual of womanhood but
“I wanted to understand how to evolve that culture and the sort of intervention it would take to change things and end this harmful traditional practice.”
Monankim is a series in which you do not feature in front of the camera – when it comes to making photographs, what are the compositional elements you look for? And does this change from taking a self-portrait versus a portrait?
I am very certain about my compositional elements when it comes to photographic image making. Both self-portraiture and taking portraits start from the aesthetic thought processing and intention. After, comes some of the things I look for, like the type of lighting as all my photographs are taken in natural light. I look out for the kind of spaces that fit the image idea and then comes the combination of arrangement of framing and positioning myself or my subject.
At the heart of your work are societal issues/failures that women must confront and deal with (often alone or in silence). How does your work celebrate the struggles of women? And how does this empower both you, as the artist, and the viewer?
“Silence; many women often find themselves sitting alone with their thoughts and problems and without the language or community to help them to better understand.”
Society dictates that we observe and conform, and this is the root of my work: the sitting alone, contemplating alone and trying to shape the story and give voice to things that must change. So, I try to celebrate this because it is important, but my works is rarely ever celebratory but rather reflective and burdensome.
Credits
Images · Jenevieve Aken
https://www.jenevieveaken.com/
Curated by contemporary American photographer Justine Kurland, ‘I belong to this’ gathers a group of 17 artists to explore notions of the self, family, death, and private and communal rituals, as part of a declaration of identification, a promise of solidarity, or a blurring of self into multitudes, as inspired by Ariana Reines’s poem ‘Save the World’, after which the exhibition is titled.
The work presented by the artists constantly refuse an emblematic or fixed identity, and instead, have repurposed their DNA into a limitless family album, resurrected ancestors, and activated psychic space to give shape to their experience. The photographs in the exhibition work collaboratively in resistance to destructive power dynamics by creating new pathways to knowledge in a pact between artist, subject, and viewer. It is through these acts of resistance that we are able to recognise ourselves both through and among others.
The artists include Genesis Báez, Jennifer Calivas, Naima Green, AK Jenkins, Sydney Mieko King, Keli Safia Maksud, Jacky Marshall, Qiana Mestrich, Shala Miller, Cheryl Mukherji, Diana Palermo, Calafia Sanchez- Touzé, Keisha Scarville, Wendy Small, Gwen Smith, Anne Vetter, Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang.
NR Magazine speaks with the featured artists about the inspirations behind their exhibition pieces.
Genesis Báez
How did growing up in both Puerto Rico and Massachusetts shape you as an artist?
It shaped who I am therefore it inherently, even if indirectly, shapes my work. Having roots in two drastically different places opened my mind up at an early age. I developed a curiosity and need to see things from different perspectives.
You and your mother feature in your piece for the exhibition. Could you talk a bit about your relationship with her?
My mother and I feature in the piece Lifting Water. We lift a heavy glass vessel that is about to overflow with water. When I made this picture, I was thinking about transference, inheritance, and the weights that we collectively carry. My friend once said that she read the image as us removing the water between Massachusetts and Puerto Rico. I like this interpretation! My mother and I like making pictures together. I inherited a relationship to Puerto Rico from her, as she took me back there for the first time when I was three, and then throughout my life. But my work is not about her or our relationship. I also make photographs with many people, both family and extended community.
What do the concepts of motherhood and motherland mean to you and your work?
I don’t think about my work in relation to motherhood, but rather the idea of an origin or belonging, and how these are quite precarious and slippery. What if you don’t have a motherland – can’t go to it, can’t stay in it, or don’t want one? I don’t have a motherland. At times it’s been painful, and other times I don’t want one and it’s a relief! Sometimes, overidentifying with a ‘motherland’ can quickly slip into complicated nationalistic tendencies. I’m more interested in describing the watery, temporal experiences of existing between worlds. I used to yearn to have a clear, grounded origin that I could go to and say, ‘I belong to this.’ Now I lean into the watery places of my belonging. Belonging can be nuanced and certainly extends beyond geography.
Jennifer Calivas
How would you describe the relationship between body, earth and identity within your practice?
It may sound corny, but sometimes I need to be close to the earth to get grounded. In graduate school I was exposed to so much in the way of art and ideas which was wonderful in many ways, but afterwards I wanted to get back to earth so much that I literally went into it. When I am underground for one of these pictures, I can’t see what things look like, so finding out how my body looks when I develop the film is really exciting. I love to see how the earth cracks and forms around me and finding out what new forms have appeared. Seeing these new sand or mud blobs take shape helps me to mess up my own sense of self and for its boundaries to feel less rigid.
What impact did performing this self-burial have on you?
It gave me a rash! All of these pictures were made by the ocean, in the sand or on mud flats. Did you know that the rotting smell of the ocean is caused by tiny microbes doing their part to digest and ferment decaying matter? When I am buried in these pictures, I can feel my body being eaten. In my effort to be still for the photograph, I end up getting consumed. The last time I made one of these images this bacteria made my skin burn and gave my assistant’s silver jewellery a patina. I think I’ve performed my last burial where I’m stuck in the sand and now. I want to move my body around which is what I’m doing in my new work.
What sculptural influences do you take from ecology and your environment?
I grew up on the coast of Maine, spending my time climbing around the shoreline, always poking and prodding at the ground to discover things. I seem to have a limitless love and fascination for this space and by burying myself in it, I get to experience it with all my senses and feel what it’s like below the surface. When I started these pictures, I had death on my mind but realised quickly that below ground is teaming with life, which has made me think about stillness differently.
Also, I am at the mercy of the weather, tides, and light when making these images. I like having to coordinate with nature in this way. There’s not much negotiation involved; I have to follow its lead. This reminds me that I am a part of environmental processes, not separate from them.
AK Jenkins
What was it like for you creating the series ‘Grandma’s Fans’?
It is very much an ancestral conversation that is happening, along with my own memories of what growing up in the church has instilled in me – how it has shaped, and at times shamed me. My grandparents’ home is still in our family and much of it remains intact. It’s really hard to create new memories in a space like that which has so many markers of presence, both physically and spiritually. It often leads me to enter into a conversation with things that may never be fully answered. It’s like how I still listen to older music and records – there is so much more I understand from them now that we both have more life in the world. The act of revisiting, be it an album or my grandmother’s house, is a practice that allows me to understand changes in meaning overtime.
What attracted you to working with portraiture?
I would say that specifically, self-portraiture is at the centre of my work right now. This shift happened after I found myself conflicted with the power dynamics and even weight of ‘shooting’ people with the camera. At the same time, we all look at the plethora of images to understand our narrative in the world. I wasn’t witnessing the nuances of my own life; it was like people like me didn’t really exist in image culture. So, imaging the complexity, strength and the love of my existence became obvious and urgent. The work is not speculative, though I’m interested in exploring that moving forward, but I’d say these thoughts, moments, and places I find myself playing with are within the context of my daily life. I appreciate that portraiture gets to the core of humanness, even though people often come to the work through identity, I think really good portraiture penetrates deeper than that. I never have to say queer and Black; you see that when I image myself. But I still do have to make images that speak to conditions of love, desire, belonging and beauty.
In writing about the series, you mention that it is ‘rapt in moments of contemplation and refusal’. How do you feel this relates to your identity as an artist?
I think it is what we try to do as artists – in making our work we are constantly wrestling with what we give, what we take or leave on the table, as we draw from our realities and imaginations.
Sydney Mieko King
Your work in the exhibition includes archival photographs of your grandmother. Could you talk a bit about your relationship with her?
My grandma lives on San Juan Island in Washington State. My parents, brother and I visited my grandparents there every summer until around 2016. My mother always said that my interest in art came from her. We used to make chalk drawings together on the cement floor of the garage while I ate Push-Ups from the freezer. One summer I was really invested in growing plants, so we tried to plant tulip bulbs near the mailbox and cared for a tomato plant together. My grandmother lived day-to-day and told us very few stories about her past. Most of the time we would watch movies and TV together or take naps on the couch. Every summer we would get into a fight, and I would spend the rest of my visit trying to make it up to her. She was tough in a way that I couldn’t handle; she had the capacity to ignore and not forgive.
If she were my age, we would be the same size and shape. Her clothes that didn’t fit my mother I now wear. The two-piece outfits, the tie-dyed gown, the house dress that she’d put on when we drove away each summer, waving from the front steps. When I saw her this summer she faded in and out of consciousness. She still made snappy comments to me and my brother, told us we were ‘being mean to grandma’ when we joked with her at the dinner table. That was her old self, the one that loved us and pushed us away. My mother says that she is silent most days now, too tired to move.
You studied Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Was this where you first became interested in the potential of the body to create new realities and histories?
The old photo labs at Princeton were right next to the ceramics studio, where a lot of sculpture students would make and leave behind their two-part plaster moulds. There were dozens of moulds of vases, mustard containers, wine glasses and other objects. I started photographing the objects I found there, angling the light so that the objects would appear as three-dimensional casts in my resulting images. I was fascinated by the idea that I could change my perception of objects through photography – to create an almost-tangible form when there was only the absence of one. After a while, I started making my own plaster moulds with a variety of materials, mostly to experiment with form. I would mould apples and oranges from the dining hall, blobs of foam insulation and snow procured from just outside the art building. I was fascinated by the way these objects could switch between two states, a shifting in form that I had begun to relate to my own understanding of identity and how it could be portrayed through photography.
How do you navigate the concept of identity through photography and its relationship to the body?
I view the difficulty of portraying the body through photography as a topographical one. It will always be impossible to fully translate and understand a three-dimensional body by transposing it onto a two-dimensional surface. To re-imagine the medium’s relationship to the body, I started bending my prints, later manipulating the surface of the negative to somehow empathise with or mimic the surface of what I was photographing. Thinking of the plaster mould as a form of proto-photography, I later returned to recording the surface of the body, itself.
Making moulds with plaster requires so much stillness – it is a material used for replicating sculptures for educational purposes, for creating ‘death masks’ of the recently-deceased. When I mould myself in plaster, I try to occupy positions that evoke movement and breath. A bend in the stomach, legs wrapped around each other, or the overlapping parts of the body. It becomes an exercise in trying to hold still, and the inevitability of the object falling off my body with each breath I take. The moulds become an archive of my body over time – a way to understand its shifts. Some moulds that I made a year ago no longer fit; sometimes I cannot remember how I created a particular mould and go through an exercise of ‘trying on’ old positions that my body once occupied.
Keli Safia Maksud
What aspects of your work stand out to you as declarations of identification?
The overarching theme in my practice is the politics of identity. I interrogate state narratives and how they are used to manufacture national identities. It is crucial that I give a sense of my background, as it runs hand in hand with my practice. I was born in Kenya to Tanzanian parents of Muslim and Christian faith, making me a Kenyan-Tanzanian-Muslim-Christian. In addition, having only ever attended British, Canadian and American schools, I cannot deny what Frantz Fanon calls, ‘Presence Europeenne’ as a constitutive element of my identity. How does one postulate a Black and/or African self within a language or discourse in which Blackness is absent? It is a result of this fragmentation in my identity that I find an interdisciplinary approach to art making to be the most accurate and naturalist way of making sense of the world.
With the theme of this issue being Identity, I thought it would be interesting to know your thoughts on the relationship between sound and identity.
Identity is tricky, because it is often thought of as being fixed. In my work I am much less interested in fixed notions of identity and more on in-between, hyphenated, and contradictory spaces between identities. I am interested in how things bleed into each other or are in excess of boundaries that we have built around them. As such, sound allows me to explore these interests because it is omnidirectional and cannot be contained. Working from the space of leakage is generative as it is where I can begin to think about questions of connectivity and cross pollination.
Could you talk a bit about the inspirations behind your work in the exhibition?
For the past two years, I have been researching and deconstructing national anthems from various African countries. When African nations gained independence from European colonial rule, they too were motivated by the ethics of self-determination by adopting new national anthems that would speak to the new ideologies of the independent states. These anthems, however, were composed using European musical conventions (notation, language, and instruments) and many were modelled after former colonial powers, thus exposing the contradictory and hybridised nature of postcolonial subject formation where self-determination both mirrors the former colonial powers while also speaking against the former colonial power. Put differently, these new states continued to use European tools of imagining while also rejecting European ideology.
The outcome of this research has ranged from works on paper to deconstructed sound works of various national anthems. The sound piece for this exhibition is a deconstruction of the Algerian national anthem. Here, I was interested in taking an anthem that is quite revolutionary and militaristic and turning it into something that connects and allows for reflection. I am interested in how sound moves through space and how it feels in the body, so this piece begins in a very high sublime range and gradually drops to a very low piano sound which plays back from a subwoofer, which is really felt in the body and ends with this coming together of voices in some form of a chorus.
Jacky Marshall
What inspired you to start working with photograms?
I have always admired Christian Schad’s Schadographs and was inspired to see what compositions I could make myself. My work is an iterative process combining all the elements of my drawing and photography, and taking my drawings into the darkroom and experimenting with new ways to make pictures was a natural process. At first it was just the poppies and ginkgo leaves, then the drawings I had been working on from Zoom life classes were added. I was drawn to the test strips which I could put together and make new collages.
What parts of your creative process help you navigate your identity?
The act of making pictures and being creative helps me express myself in ways I could not verbally articulate as a child, and probably still now as an adult. I am creating a new world for myself in my work.
What is it about blurring the boundary between painting and photography that appeals to you?
I am both a painter and a photographer. I like that I can be working on my paintings and drawings that are quick and gestural, and then take them into the darkroom and make another picture using the two processes and even adding more elements to the photograms at the same time, playing with colour through the darkroom process. Painting and drawing with light instead of paint and ink. Everything for me is available to be used and recycled.
Qiana Mestrich
Born to parents from Panama and Croatia, how do these cultures influence you and your work?
As an artist of mixed heritage, I consider my work to be transcultural in nature, meaning that it combines elements of more than one culture. I never knew my (Croatian) father, so that is a country and culture that is still very foreign to me. Eventually, I would like to use my art as a framework for discovering and connecting more to this Eastern European identity that is in my DNA.
My mother’s homeland of Panama is a very unique place geographically, it being an isthmus in Central America and the site of the canal that most people know it for. Culturally it is a mix of indigenous, European (Spanish colonial) and African influences as the country was an important centre of the trading of enslaved peoples in that region starting in the 1500s. Given this unique history, upwards of 80% of Panamanians are considered to be Black or ‘mixed race’.
Beginning in the 1830s, another wave of Black migrants came to Panama from Caribbean islands like Jamaica and Barbados – this is when my mother’s family settled in Panama. Somehow my mother’s maiden name is Scottish in origin, which we still haven’t traced back, so this cultural multiplicity is everywhere within my family tree. Genealogy is one aspect of my practice.
I’d love to know your thoughts about how you feel identity impacts knowledge sharing and community building – I know these aspects are a key part of your practice.
I first encountered photography as a teenager in the mid-1990s and I never thought twice about the fact that we studied the work of (mostly white male) artists in class. It wasn’t until I got to college where I took 3 years of colour photo and began to question, ‘where are all the Black photographers and why aren’t we studying them in class?’
My confidence as a photographer and connection to the medium was formed when I was able to discover (on my own) the works of artists like Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Andres Serrano and Renee Cox, among other emerging photo-based artists of that time. From there I devoured work by Latin American photographers like Garduno, Bravo, Cravo Neto, Iturbide; obsessed over Japanese photographers like Hosoe, Sugimoto, Moriyama, Miyako; marveled over Black British photographers picturing the diaspora in Europe like Shonibare, Pollard, Fani Kayode, Barnor….the list goes on.
Essentially, I was determined to educate myself about ‘photography’s other histories’ and that is how my blog, Dodge & Burn, was founded. The blog was initially a place for me to digitally hold my knowledge, but then it became a platform for the many photographer interviews I published. It connected me to a global photo community and judging by the feedback I got from my peers and email correspondence from curators, students, and educators, it was something we all needed.
Your piece in the exhibition includes your son – could you talk a bit about your relationship and the inspiration behind the work?
Winston is the oldest of my two children. He’s the son I wished for, and he was so excited to come into this world that he was born a month early. I literally went into labour during my baby shower! Parents can be biased towards their offspring of course but not a day goes by when I don’t marvel at his presence, and I am validated by the many compliments I get from other adults who know him.
The sequence of images I’m showing in the Huxley Parlour group show were taken during an impromptu dance session (which Winston often breaks into) while I was shooting some still life photos in my makeshift outdoor studio on the deck of our home. One of his favourite songs came on and he started doing this dance called the Orange Justice – his limbs were just cutting the summer air and I found it curious how his head just hung down the whole time – a position not typical when performing that dance.
The sun was blazing above us, and our home’s vinyl siding was the perfect reflector. I fired off multiple frames as I often do when photographing my children because I have to make every millisecond count before they tire of my requests to pose. I was trying to record Winston’s energy, this ecstasy he was in.
In interpreting the spirit of this work, I’m curious about the various (art) historical references that a viewer might apply to these photographs – from the religious (crucifixion) to the profane (lynching) to the technical capture of motion (Muybridge) but ultimately it reminds me of the transcendent experiences of African rituals throughout the diaspora that defy time and space.
Does motherhood influence your creative process at all?
Mothering has influenced my creative process in the sense that it made being an artist more urgent. Caring for two children fuelled my desires to care for and nurture the artist within me.
Shala Miller
How do you feel like your pieces in the exhibition explore the concept of identity?
I believe there is much to be seen and heard within the quotidian, and there are both simple and dynamic poetics of everyday living. Poetics that continue to help me understand the beauty and pain of Black femme adulthood, which in turn helps me understand the world around me. My entire artistic practice is bred from this belief. ‘Play’ is not just an image of myself, a Black female bodied person, beneath a tree and hanging from a tree. It is an image in conversation with my history as a Black female bodied person. It is an image about resistance and finding grounding.
What inspired you to work across text and image?
Working with text and image has been a sort of touchstone of my practice over the years. It’s what led me to video installation and writing for moving image in general. I try to use text as an extension of image making, not separate from it. In ‘Play’ specifically, I was also thinking about ethnographic field work as this image is a part of an ethnographic study I’ve been doing about the epigenetics of trauma and my relationship with my mother. The text beneath the images is a kind of poetry but then also field notes.
How important is transformation to you and your practice?
What gives steam to the engine of my practice and my personhood is being devoted to discovery and being a student of life. And I think with discovery comes transformation, or a kind of repositioning. And that is the sort of thing that I strive for in both my practice and my life.
Cheryl Mukherji
Your work for the exhibition explores transgenerational trauma through interventions in the family album. Does healing play an important part in your practice?
Healing plays as much part in my practice and life as it does with anyone. If the question leans more towards knowing if I have healed (in any way) as part of my practice, I would not have an answer to that mainly because, right now, I am interested in naming things, articulating feelings, and ideas (which is its own way of healing, I believe) more than rushing to fix them.
Are family and psychic inheritance important aspects of your identity as an artist?
Family, transgenerational trauma, and inheritance are recurring themes in my current work which makes them an important aspect of my identity too, because my work is semi-autobiographical. I don’t identify as an artist who is only concerned with and restricted to exploring these themes, but they do shape both me and my work in huge ways.
Diana Palermo
How does spirituality influence your identity as an artist?
Trust and faith are required for both. Being a heavily experimental process-based artist, I find that my fluidly intuitive relationship with materials and the unknown are a bridge. Personally, I will have moments where I feel like I’m conjuring a ghost while working in the darkroom, and moments when the by-products of spiritual rituals feel like sculptures. They influence and inform each other.
What was the inspiration behind the pieces chosen for the exhibition?
In the last year, I’ve thought a lot about the element of fire as an archetype in my life. I’ve been interrogating different symbolic meanings in direct and cryptic ways. I’ve been particularly curious about fire as both creator and destroyer. The poems in the two photographic prints are informed by these inquiries.
The long exposure lumen print (Incantation 11) is a diaristic document centred around the unknowns of Covid. I was quarantined out of my studio at Columbia University from March 17th until 26th August 2020. The exposure of that print measures that amount of time. I set up the conditions by writing a poem on a sheet of acetate and using it as a transparency by placing it on photo paper and leaving it on the floor for almost 6 months. I don’t think I knew how long it was going to sit alone in that room. In many ways it records my absence and created itself.
The other piece (Incantation 9) is a poem drawn with a flashlight while kneeling on the darkroom floor. The prints were then developed, and the image was revealed. For me, it speaks to the slow emergence of something new when fire and light are wielded in a balanced and intentioned manner.
Do you have any rituals as part of your creative process?
I am a pretty methodical person, but when it comes to actually creating the work, it can be somewhat chaotic. I find that my studio set-up and clean-up are extremely ritualistic. I place certain objects and materials in a way that would make me want to use them when I enter or leave. Though the parameters of the pieces are planned, the actions are frenetic and leave a lot of room for fortuity. I find this is much like the relationship one has with spiritual rituals.
How do you see your work as a declaration of identification?
Claiming space as a queer person in otherwise confined spiritual traditions is a declaration. I’ve done a great deal of work both internally and academically unearthing the spirits and stories of queer mystics, gods, and saints. My work is a visceral reclamation of religious archetypes and stories through intuitive actions. Though many of them are created in the dark or in an absence, they are presented in the light with all their history and power like a relic in a museum or chapel.
Calafia Sanchez- Touzé
Could you talk a bit about the inspirations behind your series of images in the exhibition?
The photographs in the show are about the feeling of premature grief. A feeling I’ve long associated with my father and brother. In Mexico, I was surrounded with images of suffering, violence, and martyrdom, mostly in a religious context. I started thinking about how those images might have affected my father as a child and his understanding of his own mortality and sickness. I used crime photographs taken from the local newspaper in Michoacán as references for my portraits, as well as iconic religious postures to position my subjects.
Has exploring aspects of the body and your family always been an interest of yours?
I think my study of the body has a lot to do with my fascination with the ways skin can make us think about death. I make images where skin is plump and smooth, folding on itself, and juxtapose it with moments where skin is older and fragile, where it becomes a thin layer that could tear at any moment. Skin shows the body’s proximity to death in its capacity (or lack thereof) to seal the inside from the outside, but it can also show nothing at all.
Gwen Smith
What inspires you to work between photography and painting?
I’m a vessel filled with pictures—sometimes the photographs that I generate are transformed into paintings or collages, and other times they maintain their shape as photographs. This fluidity of media bears traces of my own fugitive existence, the way that I connect my lived experience to a greater genealogy which crosses lines of colour, nationality, and family. I create proof of my own existence through my relation to others- the artwork is my evidence.
How important is archival imagery to you and your practice? Does it help ground your sense of identity at all?
Essentially, I am an archivist: I accumulate images, photographs of family and those who have made me who I am, shots of artworks that have struck me, and use them to chronicle meaning in my life. These images connect to one another, forming threads of belonging and selfhood through a labyrinth winding around the complications of dissociation and Blackness.
‘These artists mark an intractable this. The lens points, more like an ear than an index finger, in the direction of what is felt rather than seen.’ – Justine Kurland
The exhibition runs until October 16th, 2021.
Discover more here huxleyparlour.com
Chef and photographer Alex Paganelli has carved himself a unique position in the industry, operating with ease across the realms of food styling, film direction, menu designing and product development. Uniting the culinary, art and fashion worlds, Paganelli injects a vibrant energy into his creations, and has established himself as one to watch, having already worked on campaigns for brands like Skims and Bottega Veneta – but this is only one level of his flourishing food empire.
Growing up in the French Alps, Paganelli picked up his interest in French cuisine and cultural diversity, which came natural with Italian-British parents. Moving to London at 18, Paganelli took the techniques he learned from home with him to the kitchen and discovered a yearning for a creative process detached from tradition, and began shaping his own signature style, creating things that were stunning to behold, but also wonderful to eat.
Since establishing DeadHungry in 2015 – a studio, kitchen and creative hub for his food ideas, Paganelli has catered for specially-curated events and has built a strong reputation for daring menu design and serving eclectic, modern and experimental dishes.
Paganelli continues to subvert the conventions of food photography and conjures up scenes and dishes that are optical feasts, including life-size jelly shoes and handbags, cartoonish pies and mind-bendingly visceral table settings.
NR Magazine touches base with Paganelli in London to learn more about his visual language and creative evolution.
Growing up in France – a culinary capital of the world, how did this influence you when you first started as a chef?
France influenced me a lot. I grew up there and I lived there until I was 18. My mum is from London, so I used to come and spend my summers here with my family. My dad is from Italy, but the whole family moved to France when I was a child and we used to live close to them. They were a typical southern Italian family, so I think I’ve been influenced by all three if that makes sense- my dad’s Italian family, my mum’s British family, and then of course me growing up in France. I think all three really had an impact on my work, what I cook with and what I like to eat.
I grew up more or less with a Mediterranean diet, but then moving to London I discovered so many different types of cuisine. I met and worked with people and chefs from all over the world, so later in life I realised that even if I’m drawn to more traditional food, London has added an element of modern cooking, in a way that I don’t think I experienced growing up in France.
When did you start to shape your own signature style?
It was something that happened over time. I think my style grew after I became a photographer, but that happened a little bit later. At the beginning of my career, I was just focussing on food, but then I started documenting my work and eventually started getting hired as a photographer. Eventually it all melded together and formed what is today my style. It took a little while though. At the start, when I was only working with food and wasn’t really photographing as much, I hadn’t really figured out what my style was, and I didn’t really understand fully what it was that I was trying to do.
Eventually I started using different techniques, like I stopped using animal products and started to create more vegan dishes. That defined it a lot more, and I think that’s what made me grow in a way that was quite unexpected. Up until then I was cooking in a more traditional way, using very traditional ingredients, and when I decided I was going to use more plant-based ingredients, I realised there weren’t really any rules for that because it’s such a new way of cooking. I think that’s what really influenced the way that I cook. I realised that it was this exciting, new territory, where I didn’t have to stick to such a specific and traditional way of doing things. I think that’s when I realised my career was starting to grow in a different direction.
Are you vegan yourself then, or is that just what you happen to cook?
I cook and eat more or less the same stuff. There are a lot of chefs that will cook very differently to how they eat at home, but for me it’s more about blending it together. I don’t really believe in cooking something that I wouldn’t want to eat myself. In London I would consider myself mostly vegan, but if I’m in a place somewhere in the world where it makes sense to eat a certain food, then I can easily be influenced by those local ingredients – I have no problem doing that. I was in Nice for quite a while, and I did eat quite a bit of fish there.
For me, it’s more about blending into the environment you’re in and eating what makes sense in that location.
Yeah, that makes sense. I’ve got a lot of family in Greece, and obviously their cuisine is based a lot around things like cheese and fish, so when you travel there, it’s hard not to eat those things.
Exactly, and I also think the quality is and important part of it. I think eating a packaged piece of cheese from the supermarket is different to eating some that has been made on a really amazing farm. It’s part of the culture there which makes a big difference.
What inspired you to create DeadHungry in 2015?
I’d been working in restaurants for quite a few years, and I realised that the restaurant pace was quite draining. I couldn’t see myself doing that full time for the rest of my life. There was an aspect of photography that I’ve always loved, which started off as a hobby rather than a career. But from the beginning I decided I was going to pursue a career in food and with that and I knew there was an element of creating visuals that I was really drawn to.
I really love creating imagery with cooking, so I found a way of blending the two together. But I never thought I was going to become a photographer – it was never a goal, it just happened.
Your work explores the different textural potential of food and objects, and your film direction, particularly with Bottega Veneta employs similar aesthetics and sensory techniques to ASMR videos. Do you draw inspiration from things like that? It seems like exploring different colours and forms is a key part of your work.
I’m not specifically influenced by things like ASMR. I would say it’s more a case of me liking anything detail oriented. I like anything that focusses on a great depth of colours and textures in general, and I think that’s something that we don’t really see much in food photography, apart from real close-ups of food that I think feel quite commercial.
I was always interested in things that were odd and almost a little bit repulsive. That part of food photography is something that I don’t think a lot of food photographers touch on. That’s become my point of view over time. It’s more about photographing things that we’re not used to seeing, for example I love to photograph things that are rotting, but as a food photographer, that’s not really something that you’re going to focus on, but it’s something that I personally find really visually appealing.
Your work has a very playful feel to it and at times, a darker sense of humour that shows off a different side to food photography. What inspires you to combine the worlds of gastronomy with art and fashion in this way?
Again, that wasn’t something that I specifically thought I wanted to do. Those were just the type of clients that started coming my way, and I realised I had to adapt my work to fit the fashion world and its products in that way.
I think I’m inspired more by fashion photographers than food photographers – like more art photographers and still life photographers. That’s where my references come from. It wasn’t a conscious effort of combining the worlds of food and fashion, but over time, working with a lot of fashion brands and clients, it evolved into that.
I also noticed that some of your photographs are reminiscent of classic still lifes, but with a modern twist. Some of your tables are set in the style of the 60s and 70s, and have a nostalgic feel to them, particularly with the colourful jellies. Do you draw much inspiration from these eras?
I think I’m inspired by those eras for sure. It’s embedded into my work somehow. It’s not necessarily something I’m specifically drawn to, but there’s definitely a nostalgic feel to what I do.
I’m just attracted to anything beautiful, and perhaps a little romantic at times. I think that’s just a product of my taste.
What’s your usual working process – how do you approach developing new ideas?
I approach new ideas in lots of different ways, it just depends on what I’m doing. If I’m thinking of a photoshoot, then it’s more about understanding the product. If I’m working with a brand, I try to understand what their idea is and how I can then integrate that into what I do.
If I’m testing and developing a new dish or certain flavours, then it starts with a couple of ingredients that I want to work with – usually something seasonal that’s just become available. In that case, it’s more a matter of just testing it in my kitchen until I have something that I like.
I follow quite simple guidelines with the way that I shoot – I’m either shooting a beautiful dish as it is, or I photograph the process of it, as sometimes that looks even better than the final product. There are certain things I’ll make that are delicious to eat but that might not necessarily look very good on camera.
In terms of pure photography when it doesn’t have anything to do with a really tasty dish, then it’s more about getting the right elements in the studio on that day and getting my team to do the things they are good at, and honestly just having fun and not overthinking too much.
I think the best ideas come when you have a solid idea in your head, you don’t overthink every shot and you just have an overall idea of what the mood is going to be. The rest just falls into place.
What artists and chefs inspire you at the moment?
There are some pastry chefs that I love like Cédric Grolet in Paris. He’s very famous now but I’ve been following him for quite a while. There’s also this amazing artist called Craig Boagey that I discovered who does these incredible paintings of mushrooms but I’m also a huge fan of Sam Youkilis who does lots of moving images of mountains and stunning landscapes (amongst other things including lots of food) which remind me of home. Things come and go. I get really obsessed with people over a few weeks or a few months at a time and then I’ll move on to something else.
Do you feel like your identity as a chef and as a creative is rooted more in France or London?
I’ve lived in London my whole adult life, so I think everything that I’ve ever created with DeadHungry has been created here, so I’d say that my work is deeply rooted here. In terms of my inspiration, that definitely comes from other places. I grew up in the Alps and spent most of my childhood there, so that’s a very special place for me. Every time I go back, I feel really inspired.
It’s funny though, because I eat very differently when I’m there compared to how I eat here, and I think of food in a completely different way. I think London has this immense pressure – there’s this stress to deliver things that are exciting and different all the time, whereas in other places you don’t think of it like that. Instead, you think of food more as a necessity rather than an artform. I think they’re both very important and they’re both part of how I work. They’re two very different approaches but I don’t think I could do what I do without them both.
What do you find most interesting about the intersections of the culinary and fashion worlds?
When you work for a food client that wants to sell a product and wants to focus on what that food is for a restaurant or a hotel etc, I think you can get so stuck in trying to sell something, that you forget you can have fun and play around with it. What I really love about shooting food for a fashion brand is that it doesn’t really matter what the food is, as long as the overall image looks good or has an energy or an emotion attached to it that is interesting and visually appealing.
If you were just focussing on food clients, all you really want to do is make something look delicious, and that’s not always the best way of taking an amazing image. Sometimes trying to be too realistic takes away from the magic of creating an image. That’s what I really like doing with brands that aren’t necessarily always about food – you can have more fun with them without having to worry about what every element looks like. As soon as you start to do that you lose the sense of a really interesting image, and it just becomes more about the product.
With the theme of this issue being Identity, I thought it would be interesting to hear about your signature dishes or any favourite recipes from your childhood.
Honestly, the thing I love to cook the most is pizza. I know it sounds really basic, but it’s what I love to make the most. It’s so simple and it’s something that everyone loves, but its also something that is a lot more difficult than people think – it took me years to perfect a really good dough.
I also love pastries, and I love to cook with seaweed. I don’t really have a specific recipe that I go back to, but there are certain kinds of food that I seem to always go back to, and then maybe new flavour combinations will come out of that.
I’m really into cooking vegetable skewers at the moment, but things come and go depending on the season. Since I’ve been vegan, I find the versatility of an ingredient like seaweed to be really interesting.
What stands out to you most about the London food scene?
The level of the food industry is really high in London. When I go back to places like France, people always ask me ‘don’t you miss French food and French ingredients?’ and in Italy it’s the same. People say the food is disgusting in London, but I’ve had some of the best food in the world here. There are so many people from all over the world, and so many different communities – you can go east and see the Vietnamese community, you can go a little bit more north and see the Caribbean community, and every community has some stand out places that are incredible.
Something I miss when I go away is that idea that I can have food from all over the world. If you know where you’re going, you can find things that are incredibly special, and I love that.
The downsides are that it’s a very fast-paced city, and a lot of restaurants open and close really quickly, because its very expensive and its not necessarily financially viable to run a restaurant. I think in general, it’s a very hard city to break into. The food industry is one of the most difficult industries to get into. It’s very challenging to own a restaurant and I admire people who can actually run a restaurant 24/7, because it’s so demanding and such hard work. But I think it’s also a very special place for food.
I love it. It’s so diverse, and we have some of the best chefs in the world here. So many chefs come through London just to open a restaurant because they know the clientele is here.
Do you think you would ever live anywhere else?
That’s the question I’m asking myself! I’ve been here for 14 years, and I love it, it’s an exciting city, but I think the older I get, the more I realise I’m ready to live a life that’s a little bit more relaxed.
I think as long as I have a foot in London then that’s fine. I’d still want to be in the city, because it’s an exciting place to be, and I think you learn so much from other people here and get so easily inspired. I don’t think the level of creativity would be the same in a smaller city, and I think I would miss that if I left. But I’m definitely drawn to a more relaxed lifestyle with a bit of sun.
Is sustainability important to you and your work?
Yes, its really important! It wasn’t something I thought was that important when I started working, but now I think every chef in the world has some level of responsibility and should understand that we can’t really be cooking in the same way that we were 50 years ago. I think if we want to move to a more sustainable food chain in general, and we want to really improve our systems, whether that’s the way we farm and fish or the way that we eat – I think it’s a collective effort.
I think chefs have a responsibility to show people options and to make good examples. I take it quite seriously, that’s why I don’t cook with meat and fish anymore. Especially in a big city, you hear lots of people say, ‘what if we all bought meat and fish from sustainable farms?’ and that’s great if you have the money to do that. I don’t disagree with the idea that we should still be eating meat every once in a while, I just don’t think it should be part of our diets in the way that it is now – I think it should be something we do extremely rarely.
The problem is that it’s cheaper to buy a kilo of chicken wings in a supermarket than it is to buy really good quality vegetables. I think that’s where the responsibility for chefs lies, in breaking away from that broken system.
How would you define your visual language?
It’s quite dynamic and has a touch of camp to it. There’s something very raw and vibrant to it as well. The idea of photographing things that are very realistic doesn’t appeal to me. I like things that are a bit surreal. That’s what’s fun with photography – being able to replicate something that you don’t always see with your own eyes. I don’t understand the point of photographing things the way that you see them in real life. Why not have fun with it?
There are amazing photographers that do documentary and journalistic work. Some people are very good at that, but for me, it’s more about being able to capture something that is a little bit surreal.
What’s been the most daring or challenging thing you’ve done in your career so far?
I think generally, opening the studio a couple of years ago – that was very challenging. So far, it’s been trying to establish myself as a chef and a photographer on the same level. That was something that before I had the studio, I was really struggling to do, and my career was moving more towards creating imagery and less towards cooking, so being able to establish that has been very important. It has been challenging but also very rewarding, because I realised how important they both are, and how I couldn’t really be doing one without the other.
I think the most challenging things are yet to come. I’m looking at opening a new studio – something a bit more stable and solid, that could be running a more regularly than what I’m doing now. At the moment my studio is here, but I only open it every once in a while for dinners, so I’m looking to open something that could be a bit more permanent.
A faceless woman with black hair is reflected in the round silvery disc of a mirror. Surrounded sometimes by flowers, sometimes by fruit, these photographs are minimalistic and infinitely satisfying. Ziqian Liu is an independent Chinese photographer who developed her self taught practice whilst struggling to find a full-time job after graduation.
Liu explores two main themes within her work. The first examines the “symbiosis between human beings and nature” She states that “to some extent, it can be said that human beings and the rest of the natural world are equal – we live in the same world, breathing the same air, mutual tolerance.” Because of this, she attempts to illustrate a state of harmony between humans and nature within her work.
Secondly, she investigates the theme of perspective. Through her work, she conveys the need to scrutinise the same thing from different angles so one might discover different findings from the ones we already know. While she desires symmetry and order she understands that this is not always possible in an imperfect world. “In her work, the image in the mirror represents the idealised world she wishes to live in, and the integration with the outside is just a reminder to respect and recognise the imbalance in the real world, but also to adhere to the order and principles of our hearts.” NR Magazine joins the artist in conversation.
You have said that you want your photographs to show a peaceful harmony between humans and nature. However, is it even possible to have that said harmony in a post-capitalist society, where even with ethical sourcing the props you use in your images, such as the flowers and fruit, might have had a negative impact on nature?
I think the harmony mentioned still exists.
First of all, the props used in the pictures are all things that will be involved in my life. I will not prepare the props or throw them away for shooting but shoot what is in the home. Flowers are always in my home; they are my good friends. Fruit or vegetables are also on the menu of the day. In fact, when I shoot, I usually use the plant as the subject and myself as the prop. I will not deliberately change the form of the plant for the sake of the picture, but let my body match the inherent posture of the plant.
In the post-capitalist society, knowledge is in an irreplaceable and important position. Of course, I don’t think there is a clear boundary in the scope of knowledge. I think these props are not only objects, but also something that brings me “knowledge” through photography. I gained knowledge about plants while taking care of them, but more important is the change that solitude brought to my heart during shooting. The whole process was very positive and harmonious for me.
You have said you use mirrors in your images because you want to create the feeling of another reality within your work. Mirrors have often been considered as a bridge between reality in both mythology and popular culture, such as Louise Carol’s Alice Through the Looking Glass. Are these cultural stories something that has inspired you?
In the beginning, it was a very coincidental reason to use mirrors in the images. Originally, I was just taking pictures of plants at home. When I had a rest, I picked up the mirror beside me to look at myself. At that time, I suddenly had the inspiration to try using a mirror in my photography. Later, I found this way of shooting is very interesting, so I stuck with it.
Later, when I saw works in which mirrors appeared, such as movies or even songs, I would feel very familiar, and I would pay special attention to the way mirrors appeared in these works, which sometimes brought me inspiration.
While you consider your work ‘a space that belongs to yourself’, you have also said that you want viewers to be able to imagine that the protagonist of these images can be anyone. Have you ever considered using plus-sized models or models from different backgrounds to create more diversity in your work?
Maybe I won’t consider a model for a few years. All my works are self-portrait to find the most suitable way to get along with myself, which is also the reason and original intention for me to stick to photography.
During the daily shooting, I was alone without any assistant or other people to help me. It is only when I am alone that I am most at peace and inspired to create these images. Sometimes I can only hear my own breathing. I can’t concentrate if I’m talking to people while I’m taking pictures. Secondly, only I have the best idea of what kind of picture I want to finish, such as how high the arm should be raised, how much distance is between me and the mirror, and so on. A very small difference will make a big difference. These details cannot be communicated with the model effectively, so I might insist on completing the work all by myself.
What does identity mean to you as an artist?
For me, identity is the same as occupation. It simply summarises who I am, but does not show the whole of a person. Identity is not important to me.
In fact, I only think that I am taking pictures in the way I love. I am very honoured to be regarded as an artist. This status also encourages me to continue to be myself, not to be disturbed by the outside world, and to shoot more pictures that can bring peace and beauty to the viewer.
You have mentioned your love for flowers many times and you often use them in your work. Do you choose the specific flowers according to their meaning? And if so does that meaning give a hidden message to each photograph?
To be honest there are no specific choices and no hidden messages. As mentioned in the first question, I only take existing flowers at home. Before I became a photographer, I always go to the flower shop every weekend to pick out some fresh flowers, I enjoyed the vitality of my home very much.
You have stated that you use your artwork as a way to get to know yourself. Do you consider your art as a form of therapy to help you come to terms with your identity in life?
I quite agree with what you said. I think artistic creation is a way for me to heal myself, just like yoga and meditation, which can bring positive effects to people.
Through photography, I find that the fusion of identity has a lot to do with the change of perspective, and the biggest feeling it gives me is that I can accept myself more easily. Before photography, I was very concerned about my appearance and looked in the mirror to see if there were any flaws that needed to be covered up. But by shooting with a mirror, I had a chance to see myself from different angles, and I discovered that the so-called ‘flaws’ have their own beauty, they are just a normal part of my body. I think the integration of identity has also led to a change in my mindset, a more positive and peaceful self.
Not long ago, I just summoned the courage to face a part of my body in front of the camera – the wrinkles on my stomach. It was the first time that I discovered the beauty of the traditional impression of “flaws”.
You have stated that you wish your work to be apolitical. Do you think that choice comes from a place of privilege, as many artists are unable to separate politics from their work, or is it a necessary choice for your own personal safety?
I don’t pay attention to politics too much in daily life, so the content of my works is mainly about the harmonious coexistence between human and nature, and has nothing to do with politics. But if when the political inspires my expression of desire, I don’t think I will withdraw.
You have said before that you enjoy solitude. Did you find that the pandemic allowed you to be more productive and was a fulfilling period in terms of your art practice?
Yes, I enjoy solitude. All my work is done in solitude. In my opinion, in art practice, the most productive period is before I found my shooting style, and the most creative and efficient period is in the groping stage.
As more and more pictures are taken, I set higher requirements for myself, hoping that the content and details will be more refined. And I don’t want to be confined by a fixed style, so I try to make some changes on the original basis, so it takes more time to complete a work now than in the past.
What advice do you have for young creatives who want to work with photography?
It is important to have confidence in ourselves, trying not to imitate. There is no good, bad, beautiful or ugly work. It is enough that the work comes from the heart and is sincere.
Are you working on any specific projects at the moment and what plans do you have for the future?
I like to let nature take its course and have no plans for the future. Now I am still working steadily on my own works.
