Exhibitions
Finished
2023-06-14 • 2023-10-15
Corinne Vionnet, Vanessa Winship, María Azkarate
Bilbao Metropoli 30-30-30
8, 9 & 10 Rooms
The exhibition Bilbao Metropoli 30-30-30 presents a series of seventy-eight photographs taken in 2022 by Corinne Vionnet (twenty-three), Vanessa Winship (thirty-two) and María Azkarate (twenty-three), which show the changes that Bilbao and its metropolitan area have experienced in the past three decades from different vantage points and interests.
The project was inspired by the commission by Bilbao Metropoli-30, the Association for the Revitalisation of Metropolitan Bilbao, and is a new take the initiative that the same association promoted thirty years ago to portray the physiognomy of the urban axis along the river and its inhabitants. At that time, just like this version, overseen by curator Ramón Esparza—who has a PhD in Communication Studies and is an art critic and photography expert—six international photographers were asked to participate—Gabriele Basilico, John Vink, Bruce Gilden, Carlos Cánovas, John Davies and Carlos de Andrés—and their efforts took shape in eighty-six photographs under the title of River of Iron which were reproduced in a book and displayed at different venues in 1993. The entire series of pictures was donated to the museum in 1997.
At that time, the male gaze alit on the urban and human landscape at the critical end of an era of industrial and economic splendour, and on the icons of Bilbao’s imaginary that were on the verge of disappearing: mines, railway lines, port facilities, blast furnaces, cranes, warehouses and factories, shipyards and barges, the smoke from iron casting … all in black and white, and still with analogic cameras.
This time, again with the support of one of the leading actors in the city’s urban renewal, Metro Bilbao, three women photographers are revisiting the spirit of that mission photographique to capture the changes in the same territory over the past thirty years. As Esparza explains in the text in the book accompanying the project, the urban and human landscapes are now joined by the ‘third landscape’, the landscape where industrial ruins and their potential as an aesthetic part of the scene are taken for granted.
Perhaps Corinne Vionnet (Valais, Switzerland, 1969) offers the most radical works in the seriesWhat to See in Bilbao, with photographs of a territory where she has never been made via public databases that she superimposes and layers in the end image. In her second series, Almost There, she works with the fragmentation of the frames and its effect on the compositions and on us, the observers.
Vanessa Winship (Barton-upon-Humber, United Kingdom, 1960) tackles her work from a more poetic perspective which depersonalises the spaces and scenes to limit the documentary layer and create indeterminate images which foreground the symbolic and emotional component.
Finally, based on her training as an architect, María Azkarate (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 1977) takes an interest in places that are a far cry from what is usually considered monumental, the ‘interstices’, in Esparza’s words, that reveal another way to read the city.
Corinne Vionnet (Valais, Switzerland, 1969) offers, perhaps, the most radical works in the seriesWhat to See in Bilbao, with photographs of a territory where she has never been made via public databases that she superimposes and layers in the end image. In her second series, Almost There, she works with the fragmentation of the frames and its effect on the compositions and on us, the observers.
Vanessa Winship (Barton-upon-Humber, United Kingdom, 1960) tackles her work from a more poetic perspective which depersonalises the spaces and scenes to limit the documentary layer and create indeterminate images which foreground the symbolic and emotional component.
María Azkarate (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 1977) takes an interest in places that are a far cry from what is usually considered monumental, the ‘interstices’, in Esparza’s words, that reveal another way to read the city.
Corinne Vionnet (Valais, Switzerland, 1969)
She currently lives in Vevey (Switzerland). She began to develop what became a long, fruitful artistic inquiry project into the image on Internet in 2005. Through processes like appropriation and combinations of images, she reveals the way they contribute to shaping our social imaginary and vision of the world as they combine and even become confused with reality. Technically, Vionnet’s digital photographs apply the system used in the early twentieth century by the British scientist Francis Galton, who superimposed images of faces based on the eyes in an attempt to discover the prototypical features of a given social type, like thieves. Vionnet transfers this technique to the image of consumption. After statistically choosing the places photographed the most in a city, she chooses the shot repeated the most in a laborious task of discarding. Locating a point of reference, she builds an image that becomes the synthesis of all of them yet that also enables us to see how behind the promise that we can all become authors and express our creativity, the Internet conceals a kind of cage that holds us all, that guides our acts and our way of observing the world.
The project she is presenting in this exhibition is divided into two sections. In the first one, All You Can See in Bilbao, she uses digital collage with an artistic imprint to show us the benchmark places in the city, both old and new. In the second section, Almost There, she draws fragments from discarded photographs in which a person appears, but their figure is partially hidden, so they seem to be a part of a screen border. She thus aims to draw attention to the way the medium, the physical screen, mediates our perception.
Vanessa Winship (Barton-upon-Humber, United Kingdom, 1960)
She first studied photography at the Hull School of Art in Kingston upon Hull and later specialised at the Filton Technical College in Bristol and the Polytechnic of Central London (currently Westminster University). She met her husband, the photographer George Georgiou, at the latter, whom she ‘blames’ for her interest in the Balkan region. She lived in Belgrade, Athens and Istanbul for ten years and currently divides her time between the United Kingdom and Bulgaria. The countries surrounding the Black Sea, a traditionally stormy region, are the site where Winship has visually developed reflections on ideas like difference, frontiers and what is true and false in identity constructions. Books like Sweet Nothings, a series of portraits of students at schools located in the border zones of Anatolia, paved the way for her international recognition. She has won the World Press Photo in 1998 and 2008, and in the latter year she also won the Godfrey Argent Award from the National Portrait Gallery of London and the Iris d’Or Award from Sony World Photography. In 2011, she was also the first woman to win the Henri Cartier Bresson Award. In 2005, she joined the Agence Vu’ of Paris, although she has kept her status as an independent photographer.
Even though she has made the transition to digital technology, forced like many others by the development of the industry, Winship has made most of her works—Schwarzes Meer (2007),Sweet Nothings (2008), She Dances on Jackson (2013) and And Time Folds (2018)—with a 35-mm camera in the classic documentary photography way, and with a plate camera. Hence the leaps in rhythm and style that can be detected in her works, where photographs revealing a quick look, taken on the run, combine with others that are much more calm, generally portraits, which entail greater reflection and a very different type of communication with her subjects. In 2014, she admitted to the blogger Christopher Lane that ‘each of these ways of working has their own beauty to me’, one that lies in the perfect balance between action and rest.
María Azkarate (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 1977)
She studied architecture at the University of Navarra in the Urban Planning specialisation. After several years working in that field, she discovered photography as a medium of expression and began a self-teaching process in which she was in touch with photographers like Carlos Cánovas, Paco Polán, Jon Cazenave, Awoiska van der Molen, Federico Clavarino, David Jiménez and Eduardo D’Acosta, among others. In 2017, she began to work as an architecture photographer, helping to communicate the projects of studios and companies associated with that field, while also creating more personal works on the city and architectural spaces, topics which are currently at the core of her work.
Azkarate uses the camera, which always builds a vision focused on the centre, to investigate the polar opposite: what exists on the margins. This approach to urban space means that she avoids those typical hubs of attention, iconic or spectacular buildings, to instead direct her gaze at the edges of the sites built by architects and urban planners. All town halls have an administrative area called ‘urban planning’ in charge of planning and setting the limits of what can be done in the space. Azkarate’s work does not seek out urban extravagances but instead draws from elements that remain outside this order, such as a simple wisp of grass springing up between the cracks in slabs or a plot of land that has not been urbanised, breaking the harmony of a row of buildings. This inversion of values first manifests itself in the composition of her images, which place what should be the focal point in the background and foreground the void. With this simple switch, the photographs create a clear visual shock and open up a suggestive pathway for spectators.
Content related to the exhibition: Corinne Vionnet, Vanessa Winship, María Azkarate
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