Presented by Whitebox Art Center
Curated by Laura Cherubini

May 12 – June 14, 2015
May 17 @ 4-8PM | Opening Celebration

Participating Artists:

Francesco Jodice
Carolina Sandretto
Corinna von der Groeben

Whitebox Art Center is pleased to present Anthropological Landscape, an exhibition featuring a new generation of photographers whose works render null the divide between portrait and landscape. Though a language of duality still separates these two genres within the medium – the internal, intimate versus the external, societal – today’s conditions of globalization and urbanization challenge these dichotomies as the human subject further intertwines with the surrounding environment. The ‘documentary’ immediacy and investigative capacity of the photographic medium enables this new scheme of ‘photographer-as-anthropologist,’ to render the landscape as an integral element of culture availed of subject.

Through the works of Francesco Jodice, Carolina Sandretto and Corinna von der Groeben, an anthropological landscape is affirmed: the landscape speaks of mankind, of human work, of communities and urban spaces they build. Francesco Jodice explores humanity’s collective capacity to transform ‘place’ into its own image and likeness. Carolina Sandretto reflects upon issues of immigration and sojourn, on forsaking and reinventing locality. Corinna von der Groeben’s images are destabilized sites of festivity culled from the quotidian, seizing perplexing countenances and signs of crisis; constructed environments are alienated from their social functions in her work, reframed by the explicit absence of human architectures.

Jodice captures uncanny trajectories of global urbanization as populations drastically reshape their surroundings, yielding far-fetched developments in the landscape. His ambivalent and at times dystopian images and film, focus on the manifestation of desire through the willful recreation of subliminally reconditioned worlds. Alongside von der Groeben’s scenes of residual activity, the work brings to the forefront the constructed elements of landscape. Sandretto’s positional portraiture, in which figure and ground are interdependent, presents a contrasting illustration of the permeable boundary of the portrait.

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Living in Milan, Francesco Jodice works both in photography and film, focusing on the social and political subtleties that accompany urban development, on a global scale.

Carolina Sandretto, born in Italy and based in New York City, seeks to instigate social change working with disadvantaged groups in neighboring Mexico and Cuba.

Corinna von der Groeben, born in Germany and based in Mexico City, is interested in relics of urbanization and the boundaries between stillness and action.

Together, the three photographers capture challenging views of contemporary environments across the European and American continents, allowing for a fresh, crisp dialogue between divergent histories, geographies, and politics.

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Laura Cherubini is currently professor of History of Contemporary Art at the Brera Academy, Milan, and vice president of the MADRE Museum, Naples.

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Press

CNN, A Side of Cuba Not Often Seen by Patrick Oppmann