With the help of photography, Anne Geene (NL, 1983) investigates, collects and organises the world around her. She captures the hidden beauty of plants and animals and – with a nod to the human urge to order and to know – she examines concepts such as possession, completeness, selection and desire. The artist’s interpretation of her findings is strictly personal and refers to our urge to regulate and understand the world around us.
At Art Rotterdam, Geene will present large prints from the new project 'Fields of Grass' and her newest developments of the series 'Eeuwig Herbarium'. 'Fields of Grass' consists of individually scanned blades of grass from a field in the direct surrounding of Anne Geene, each work considering a different field. “There are about six hundred trillion blades of grass on earth. Still it is an undervalued plant — everyone just walks on it. Time for an ode to grass,” says Geene. 'Eeuwig Herbarium' is a combination of preserved plant material and its photographic reproduction. In this way, an eternal comparison is created between the original colour (captured at the time of picking) and the fading organic equivalent.
Elsa Leydier (France, 1988) lives and works between France and Brazil. Her artistic practice revolves around the political charge of photography. Her recent series 'LUTOA (The Disobediences)' is framed by ecofeminism and concerns the authorized deforestation of the Atlantic Forest. Currently, only 8% of the surface which covered Brazil when the Portuguese invaded, remains. The construction of the new industrial port that is currently underway, further destroys acres of forest and the seabed on the migration path of whales. In this work, Leydier speaks of the raise against injustice. She is echoing the recent widespread feminist street collages, black painted letters have changed ‘luto’ into ‘luta’. In Portuguese, ‘luto’ means mourning and ‘luta’ means fight.
BIO Anne Geene
Anne Geene lives and works in The Hague, the Netherlands. She studied photography at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, at Sint Joost in Breda, and graduated with a Master’s degree from the University of Leiden in 2010. Her graduation project ‘No 235 / Encyclopaedia of an Allotment’ was chosen the best photobook of 2010 by NRC and the project was purchased by the Nederlands Fotomuseum. In 2014 she won the Unseen Talent Award and her work was selected for several national and international exhibitions and collections. With ‘Ornithology’, a quasi-scientific standard work about birds which she made together with Arjan de Nooy, she won the international price for best book of 2017 (Goldene Letter, buchmesse Leipzig). In 2018 she won the Volkskrant Visual Art Award (both jury and public award) for her oeuvre and held a presentation in the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam.
Anne Geene’s work is in the collections at a.o. Rijksmuseum, Het Nederlands Fotomuseum, The Kröller-Müller Museum, Museum Van Bommel Van Dam, Van Gogh House, ING , LUMC, KPMG, Ministry of Education, Culture and Science & Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Recent exhibitions include a.o. the Kröller-Müller Museum, Nederlands Fotomuseum, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Museum Jan Cunen.
BIO Elsa Leydier
Elsa Leydier’s recent exhibitions include Jeu de Paume outside-the-walls (Le Cellier, France), Festival Encontros da Imagem (Portugal), Festival Photo Climat (France), Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie – Fondation Manuel Rivera Ortiz (France), Atelier Noua (Norway), Hosoo gallery (Japan) among other shows in in Colombia, the US, the Netherlands, Portugal and France. Elsa Leydier was one of the finalists of both FOAM Talents 2020 and 2019, Dahinden – Photo Climat Award 2021, a laureate of the French national Photographic commission Image 3.0 (2020) and for the Mentorat Des Filles de la Photo (2020-2021). In 2019, she won the Prize Maison Ruinart Paris Photo 2019 and was one of the winners of the Dior Photography Award for Young Talents.