OPENING UNDER RESERVATION
CHANGES IN HEALTH MEASURES
FREE ENTRY
WEDNESDAY - SUNDAY
14 p.m. - 18:30 p.m.
Exhibition supported by the DRAC Grand Est, the Grand Est Region and the City of Strasbourg.
In collaboration with le BredaPhoto Festival (Netherlands) which made possible the presentation of the photographs in the series Shroud by Simon Norfolk and Klaus Thymann.
Youth! Mountains !
They are the place, the place of our next uprisings.
I listened to the stories of breathtakingly beautiful mountains, bathed in sharp scree-grays, nostalgic green-larches - homesickness - and huge Giotto-blues. I saw the images of Mount Kenya and Mount Hermon, snow-capped, the Furka Pass, the birth of the Rhone River. Weren't these the only two hypotheses to consider? Immerse yourself in Giotto's work or breathe the mountain air? Simon Norfolk, Nadim Asfar and Klaus Thymann - the Englishman, the French-Lebanese and the Danish - are poets in love with peaks and vast expanses. They are guardians, attentive, worried, preoccupied artists. It must be said that in this year two thousand and twenty Great game by Céline Minard was tempting, the capsule,
hanging from the pitons, would have been a last consolation and the old woman with the curved nails, a last comrade. But poetry is declaimed, it is shared, it vibrates from peak to peak. You have to play with words, with languages, choose an exhibition title, simply say "Mountain", by pressing the a like Wajdi Mouawad and his little boy: “Montââgne”. Savor the gn wet and walk along the torrents that sometimes spill twenty thousand liters of water per second. Then, with you, Youth, lift the mountains.
Céline Duval, editorial, December 2020.
Curator: Céline Duval
Visuals 2 and 3: Mountain experience, 2015-in progress © Nadim Asfar
Visual 4: Shroud, 2018 © Simon Norfolk and Klaus Thymann
The exhibition, a real breath of fresh air and a necessary Beauty shoot after a trying year, brings together the projects of artists Nadim Asfar (LB), Simon Norfolk (GB) and Klaus Thymann (DK). Alongside this Beauty which borders on the Sublime, the three photographers will, through their work, sometimes bear witness to the memory of a country, sometimes the lookouts of an increasingly alarming global climatic situation.
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In work Mountain experience (2015-ongoing), Nadim Asfar, Franco-Lebanese photographer and videographer, focuses on the depopulated mountainous countryside of his country of origin with the meticulousness of a land surveyor and the sensitivity of a romantic landscape painter, to attempt to demystify a landscape that is both arid and fertile, long considered a national and traditional symbol in Lebanese painting.
Simon Norfolk's photographs featured in the exhibition are from a haunting series on climate change. Taking as subject the Lewis Glacier, in Kenya, the work When I am Laid on Earth (2014) provides information on the extent of the disappearance of the glacier: with fire, the artist traced its limits in 1934, 1963 and 1987. These images evoke the temporal character of the landscape, using the product precisely questioned in climate change to register its effects on the landscape.
The melting of glaciers around the world, which shows better than any other phenomenon the effects of climate change, is also at the origin of the project. Shroud (2018), an English term which can be translated as “shroud”. Using a helium balloon fitted with lights, the artists Klaus Thymann and Simon Norfolk went to photograph the Rhône glacier in Switzerland, which offers a curious spectacle: it was draped in geothermal blankets to limit its disappearance; the gesture is loaded with grace and beauty, but alas, the effort is in vain.
at the heart of the sublime
The scenography of the exhibition offers visitors a fully immersive spectacle. By placing oneself in the center of the three printed tarpaulins several meters high (by Simon Norfolk and Klaus Thymann), or by following the twenty meters of awagami paper unrolling in front of us the Beauty of the Lebanese peaks (by Nadim Asfar), the experience of the Mountain is total.
WITHIN THE PUBLIC SPACE
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Nadim Asfar is a Franco-Lebanese photographer and videographer. Born in Beirut in 1976, he lives and works between Paris and Beirut. His work has been exhibited in many museums and fairs including Paris Photo, New Museum in New York, Kunst Werke Institute in Berlin and the International Documentary Festival in Marseille. Named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2014, his work is in numerous private and public collections.
Born in 1963 in Lagos, Nigeria, Simon norfolk lives and works in Great Britain. Simon Norfolk is a landscape photographer who has worked for twenty years on an exploration of the “battlefield” in all its forms. He has photographed war zones and refugee crises. The superposition of time in the landscape exerts a permanent fascination with him.
Klaus Thyman is a Danish photographer, director, writer and artistic director born in Copenhagen in 1974. He has forged his own outlook through the practice of a wide variety of mediums, bringing together journalism, photography, cartography, documentary and exploration. He founded “Project Pressure” in 2008; this non-profit organization works with internationally renowned artists to make the consequences of climate change visible.
