At Unseen 2021, we are presenting three internationally-acclaimed female artists: Margaret Lansink (NL), Elsa Leydier (FR), and Anastasia Samoylova (US). In this presentation, all three of them in their own language touch on the subjets of climate, environment, natural processes, and offer an aesthetic expression on these topics.
Anastasia Samoylova will show her newest body of work, Floridas. A logical follow-up to her FloodZone, a project on rising sea levels, Floridas zooms into one state of Florida to meticulously observe and reveal its cultural, political, and climatical starkness. Samoylova sees and shows Florida as a condensed version of the whole US while maintaining an outsider’s perspective and paying homage to Walker Evans. Naturally, a subject of the devastating effect of climate change and people's disregard for it can't escape Samoylova's eye. This project was made through a series of wandering road trips, a traditionally male-dominated genre within American photography. Anastasia expands this field with a female perspective.
Margaret Lansink's presentation consists of the latest series body maps — a visual interpretation of the ambivalence between hiding, accepting, and fighting the stereotypes around women’s age. This project invites to contemplate if it is worth intruding into the natural processes. It interconnects delicate feminine images with close-up observations of nature where human intervention has left a deep impact. Lansink documented industrial forests in Portugal, grown for paper production and set on fire for the harvest. Margaret Lansink uses photography to bridge the personal and universal. Her images present an open and honest reflection of her own inner emotions, shot as self-portraits in the broadest sense of the word.
Elsa Leydier is exhibiting her project Heatwave where she looks at climate change through an instance of the wine-making industry. For champagne, a drink with a centuries-long heritable recipe, global warming is a threat. Fluctuations in temperature extremes are harmful to the quality of the grapes, and harvesting in hot weather is particularly detrimental. Heatwave offers Leydier’s artistic vision of the relation between nature and the people who work tightly connected with it — as well as an interpretation of the climate crisis on civilization. For this series, she created her rayograms, cameraless images, by placing vines on photosensitized paper and exposing it to light. A poetic project to highlight the urge to battle climate change.