London Art Fair 2016: Artists announced for Photo50

Laia Abril / Ekaterina Anokina / Jo Broughton / Natasha Caruana / Elinor Carucci / Francesca Catastini / Dicipula / Jh Engström / Ej Major / Timothy Prus / Maya Rochat / Paul Schneggenburger / Mariken Wessels

13 international artists working with photography have been selected for the next edition ofPhoto50 at London Art Fair 2016. Entitled ‘Feminine Masculine: On the Struggle and Fascination of Dealing with the Other Sex’, the exhibition is curated by Federica Chiocchetti, Founding Director of the photo-literary platform Photocaptionist.

Photo50 is an annual guest-curated exhibition which provides a critical showcase of some of the most interesting and distinctive elements of current photographic practice.

‘Feminine Masculine’ is supported by Genesis Imaging and is located within London Art Fair on Gallery Level 2.

This year’s exhibition is loosely inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 masterpiece Masculin Féminin and explores the challenge of representing the mysterious, at times ineffable and immaterial, dynamics between a woman and a man.

It features the work of well established artists alongside emerging voices.

Federica Chiocchetti says: ‘Usually when I feel very confused about a theme I decide to do something with it, be it an exhibition, an article, a book or a talk. Perhaps to end up even more confused than I was at the outset. Feminine and Masculine are almost monolithic categories. Often treated as binary oppositions, they are imbued with fossilised prejudices and clichés. I remember reading Valentine de Saint Point’s 1912 ‘Manifesto of the Futurist Woman in response to F. T. Marinetti’. “It is absurd – she writes – to divide humanity into men and women. It is composed only of femininity and masculinity.” These words prompted me to look at women and men in relation to one another, instead of focusing on gender as an individual entity. Being a mastodontic topic, the result is, inevitably, a subjective prelude that navigates – somewhat franticly – through women’s relationships with men, from rigidity to flux, via obsession and boredom.’

Presented with a feminine narrative voice, ‘Feminine Masculine’ primarily (though not exclusively) features the work of contemporary female artists who subtly respond to the struggle and fascination of dealing with the other sex. With no intention of offering definitive answers, it aims to be a whimsical and allusive visual journey, mixing satire, sadness, romanticism and emotional clichés.

The exhibition is divided into five sections: ‘He loves me, He loves me not’, ‘Till Death Do Us Apart’, ‘Ennui and Obsession’, ‘Carrying On Without Them’ and ‘Wrap Thee with Fluctuant Winds’.

Highlights include a presentation of Elinor Carucci’s intimate work on her relationship with her husband, from her acclaimed project ‘Closer’. The UK premiere of a number of international emerging artists, such as Austrian Paul Schneggenburger’s somewhat ‘photo-dynamic’ series ‘The Sleep of the Beloved’: a ‘nocturnal lovers’ dance’ featuring photographs of lovers asleep taken with a six-hour exposure from midnight to 6am.

Russian Ekaterina Anokina’s will present ‘25 Weeks of Winter’, a painful yet poetic story ofseparation and lovesickness. Italian Francesca Catastini with her series ‘Happy Together’ of highly staged bourgeois moments of the artist and her companion in everyday situations plays with modes and conventions, which hark back to yesteryear. Swiss Maya Rochat with her vibrant and fetterless impetus rebels against conformism and offers unconventional and multi-layered images to interrogate the viewers’ perceptions, confusing their assumptions and ingrained readings.

EJ Major undertook a participatory mail art project which involved hand-delivering over 7,000 screenshots, taken from each second of the 1972 Bernardo Bertolucci sexual and violent film Last Tango in Paris, to households throughout the UK as postcards captioned ‘Love is…’. A selection of anonymous replies will be exhibited, and visitors will be challenged to speculate the gender of the respondent – this will nod to the role of cinema in fabricating beliefs and stereotypes around notions of love and relationships.

Visitors will also be led through a central video space projecting two pieces: Laia Abril’s acclaimed ‘Tediousphilia’, on the phenomenon of young couples offering on-demand sex performances online in exchange of few hundred pounds a week, and a special new video commission by award winning Italian collective Discipula, titled ‘Mannequins & Mankind’ that plays with notions of celebrities, sex-symbolism and groupies.

Alongside Photo50, contemporary photography is widely exhibited throughout London Art Fair by galleries including BEETLES+HUXLEY, Crane Kalman Brighton, GALERIE bart, James Hyman Gallery, Matèria and Purdy Hicks Gallery.

London Art Fair’s Photography Focus Day takes place on Wednesday 20 January 2016 with artist talks, guided tours and panel discussions examining contemporary photographic practice. An associated programme of events will run in parallel with the exhibition including artist talks, panel discussions and guided tours.