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Haiti has long been known as a benighted place of poverty and
corruption. Even before the 2010 earthquake destroyed much of the
country, it was beset by difficulties inextricably rooted in its
history of rebellion and revolution. Since gaining independence
from France in 1804, following the only successful slave revolt in
the history of the world, Haiti s past has been characterized by
dictatorships, serious conflict, and near-constant social and
political unrest, as the country struggles to define its
independence and realize its promise. Haiti: The Perpetual
Liberation collects 140 photographs of Haiti by Swiss photographer
Thomas Kern, taken in black and white with an analogue camera over
the course of twenty years of travel there. As the photographs
demonstrate, the people of Haiti remain determined to realize the
country s promise in the face of crushing poverty and crisis, and,
behind the barrage of bad news that dominates its public image, it
is a country full of hope and life. The photographs, which make up
the first part of a four-part boxed set, are joined by three
separate text booklets each in one of three languages: English,
German, and Creole that feature texts by Kern on his work and his
approach to the country, as well as two essays by Swiss journalist
Georg Brunold and Haitian novelist Yanick Lahens that provide
context and commentary for the images and discuss the country s
people and culture, and its enduring political conflict. A powerful
photographic portrait, Haiti: The Perpetual Liberation shows a
different, more personal and therefore also more ordinary view of
the troubled country that reaches beyond what we think we know
about Haiti.
Swiss photographer Roland Iselin, born 1958, graduated from the
famous photography class at the School of Design in Zurich (today
Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK) and also completed a Master's
degree at New York's School of Visual Arts. Prior to his artistic
education, he completed his studies in socio-cultural animation at
Zurich-based Institute of Applied Psychology. Unguided Road Trip is
Iselin's latest long-term project. Since 2011, he has been
travelling his native Switzerland and his adopted second home
country, the US, documenting how in either place the landscape is
'furnished' with all sorts of structures and objects. Bus stops,
public toilets, gas stations. We recognise such things and make use
of the convenience they offer, yet we forget about them again
immediately. In small and densely populated Switzerland, the
landscape is cluttered with objects that serve a specific purpose:
phone and letterboxes, benches, signposts, wayside crosses. But
equally, the vast and scarcely inhabited open landscapes in the US
are cut-across by roads lined by mass-produced objects.Iselin has
found many motifs common in both countries: memorials for victims
of road accidents, cattle gates, rifle ranges with their pavilions,
rest stops. A landscape's 'furniture' does not accumulate
accidentally. Rather, each object is placed intentionally, and they
testify, in a way, to a society's state. Iselin's images
demonstrate values and ideals, showing how the design of these
objects guides our behaviour. This new book brings together some
140 photographs from Iselin's Unguided Road Trip, for the first
time. The images are complemented with texts by writer and
photography critic Nadine Olonetzky.
Celestial mechanics have fascinated mankind in all known cultures.
Many artists throughout history have been captivated by the
spectacle we observe above us day and night. Swiss photographer
Guido Baselgia has expanded the focus of his work on the sky, with
the stellar and solar movements and phenomena as we see them from
earth. In his most recent work Light Fall, Baselgia makes traceable
the trajectory of celestial bodies invisible to the human eye and
shows astounding occurrences of light and shadow. Taken in Norway,
the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in Argentina, in Ecuador, and the
Swiss Alps, the images visualise the geometry of astrodynamics and
celestial mechanics. His photography also captures the phenomenon
of umbra, planet earth's shadow thrown into space. The new book
Guido Baselgia - Light Fall features 80 stunning tritone plates.
Complemented with essays by German scholar Andrea Gnam and Swiss
photography critic Nadine Olonetzky, they offer a window into the
light phenomena that leave us awestruck today as much as they did
our ancestors.
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Blossom (Hardcover)
Anna Halm Schudel; Contributions by Nadine Olonetzky, Franziska Kunze
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R1,504
R1,113
Discovery Miles 11 130
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Flowers are a perennially popular motif throughout art history. And
for good reason: lush with texture and colour, a living bouquet of
blooms can be made to communicate much through the masterly
brushstrokes of Vincent Van Gogh or Georgia O'Keeffe, in the hands
of a skilled ikebana artist, or through the lens of contemporary
photography. For more than two decades, Swiss photographer Anna
Halm Schudel has focused her eye on flowers, zooming in on calyxes,
pistils, and leaf veins to create exuberant feasts of colours.
While celebrating the wide variety of shapes and sizes that nature
and human cultivation have brought us, Schudel is no less
fascinated by the process of decay. As the flowers fade, wilt, and
wither, she transforms them under water into images of strange,
compelling beauty, to combine their delicate beauty with a stirring
memento mori. Eighty strikingly beautiful colour plates are
complemented by two essays that examine Schudel's symbolism and put
her work in context with the history of the floral still life. As
exquisite as the subject itself, this beautifully designed large
book is sure to inspire appreciation for this rising Swiss artist.
Text in English and German.
Glaciers in the Alps and on Greenland have been melting away slowly
for decades. Global warming has increased the speed of their
retreat drastically in recent years. Swiss geophysicist Alfred de
Quervain (1879-1927) carried out the first survey of the Clariden
glacier in the Swiss canton of Glarus and initiated and led
important scientific expeditions on Greenland in 1909 and 1912.
Swiss artist Martin Stutzle and photographer Fridolin Walcher also
link Glarus with Greenland. Both have made the Swiss glaciers the
subject of their work and, in May 2018, joined a Swiss research
campaign investigating the current state of the glaciers on the
world's largest island. The photographs and prints they produce
reflect an intense awareness of scientific facts, yet they strike
the viewer emotionally and aesthetically. This book blends the
essence of glaciological and geophysical research with contemporary
art and picks up on Alfred de Quervain's legacy. Prints and
photographs are featured alongside three easy-to-read essays
offering a concise survey of the findings of the 2018 expedition. A
fourth essay comments on Stutzle's and Walcher's works and explores
current trends in climate art. Text English, German and Kalaallisut
(Greenlandic).
Every garden is an imagined paradise - a garden paradise that
incorporates the personality of the individual who created it, but
also the long history of horticulture. The book recounts the
history of gardens from their likely origins in Mesopotamia to
today; in chronological order and in sections with keywords, it
introduces the most important styles as well as the people that
have influenced developments in Europe. Although the famous and
influential gardens often needed extensive funds for their
creation, gardens are not designed for the privileged of this
world. Whether it is an allotment, a landscape park, a cemetery, or
a city park - small and large gardens interweave with the built
landscape and are an inspiration for all of us.
For more than 20 years, photographic artist Tobias Madorin has been
working on his series Topos. Metropolises like Barcelona and Sao
Paulo, a Swiss mountain resort like Grindelwald, or foreign
countries like Uganda, Indonesia and Japan: with his large scale
images he explores dwellings and landscapes. Madorin creates
tableaux, similar to 19th-century painters. His particular
interests are places where people gather, places on the outskirts
of cities along arterial roads, waste disposal sites, or areas
changed and scarred by agriculture and mining. He understands such
places as products of human visions and ideals, but also as result
of exploitation and greed, as sites of fight for survival. Tobias
Madorin - Topos is the first monographic book on Madorin's work,
presenting his most important pictures from twenty years. An essay
by the journalist and art critic Nadine Olonetzky comments
Madorin's oeuvre and puts it in context of contemporary photography
and the history of representing landscapes and cities.
The first monographic book on Dominic Büttner's art, featuring
one-hundred of his 'Dreamscapes', nightly landscapes and cityscapes
shot with large format view camera. Essays by Elisabeth Bronfen and
Nadine Olonetzky. Text in English and German.
Transformation processes are the focus of Georg Aerni's new
photographs. The Swiss photographer and artist shows plastic
greenhouses that have annexed whole swathes of land for
agricultural mass production, residential houses that have been
built overnight on the city outskirts without construction machines
and literally noiselessly. He points his lens at olive trees that
have grown over centuries into figures full of character, at
creepers that conquer leftover spaces between high-rises and
motorways, and at mighty rock faces that are being gnawed by
erosion. With the merging of art and documentation that is typical
of Aerni's work, Georg Aerni-Silent Transition makes the signs of
change the object of a contemplative observation and at the same
time asks challenging questions: about our handling of natural
resources, about the social backgrounds to cities growing out of
control, about the regenerative force of nature. A decade after
Aerni's first monograph, Sites & Signs, this new book showcases
the artist's ongoing continuation of his photographic work through
numerous individual images as well as new series. 166 beautiful
colour and black-and-white plates are introduced through texts by
Peter Pfrunder and Nadine Olonetzky and commented on with an essay
by Sabine von Fischer. Text in English and German.
Cecile Wick's work, oscillating among photography, painting, and
drawing, is one of the most important oeuvres in contemporary Swiss
art. Solo exhibitions in various galleries and a large
retrospective at the Museum of Fine Art in Berne have recently
showcased her prints and etchings to great acclaim."Cecile Wick.
Colored Waters" offers readers the first glimpse of the artist's
more recent photographs and, in particular, drawings. Watercolors,
ink drawings, inkjet prints and photographs are presented in
series, putting media and motifs in a dialogue and revealing new
aspects of Wick's work. Around 160 color reproductions of artworks
are complemented with essays by Martin Jaeggi and Nadine Olonetzky
on subjects such as light, traces, signs, buildings, nature, and
rhythm in Wick's oeuvre.
Swiss artist Barbara Davi, born 1971, primarily works with the
medias of installation and photo-collage. Following her artistic
education at Zurich's School of Art and Design (today Zurich
University of the Arts ZHdK) and Lucerne School of Art, Davi has
developed her original style, working in three-dimensional space as
well as on two-dimensional surfaces, using architectural and
geometric shapes and elements. Using wooden slats or a table, lines
or a circular shape, light beams or a shadow, Davi creates
quasi-drawings in space and photo-collages of a magical, almost
three-dimensional depth. Her motifs emerge from a sequence of
deliberations, from her 'train of thought'. This first monograph on
Barbara Davi features her striking work from the past ten years.
Around 100 plates in colour and black and white are complemented by
essays on Davi's way of working in her preferred media.
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