DAYANITA SINGH (INDIA)
“What I say to young people, when they want to study photography,” says Dayanita Singh, “is ‘Don’t bother with photography, Go study literature and then come to photography.’” With origins in photojournalism, Singh now calls herself “a bookmaker working with photography.” Her work blurs the line between photography, sculpture and the artist’s book. “The photographs ask to be read,” she says, “as if the book were a collection of stories.” Drawing on a vast photographic archive, she sequences and edits series of black and white images into ‘visual novels.’ Arranging photographs within vitrines, she also makes miniature museums, in which storylines change as images are moved and create new relationships. The museums have titles like Museum of Furniture, which only contains photographs of uninhabited rooms. She is currently creating a Museum of Smoke. The element of chance plays a large role in her work, as new juxtapositions of images create unexpected resonances. “I don't want to tell you the whole story, because there is no complete story,” she says. “The story keeps changing.”
ILSE D’HOLLANDER (BELGIUM)
Ilse d’Hollander’s paintings have been compared to Bonnard and Matisse. Bonnard once wrote Matisse, “I enjoy defining the different types of landscape, ‘space’ landscape, intimate landscape, decorative landscape.” D’Hollander made many types of landscape paintings of rural Flanders, where she lived toward the end of her life. They vary in degrees of abstraction. At times objects on the horizon are delineated, at others they recede into the simplest forms: a swath of paint, a single brushstroke. There is a deep sense of solitude to her small, jewel-like paintings, many of which are small enough to hold in the palm of one hand
TACITA DEAN (GREAT BRITAIN)
Tacita Dean films buildings that are falling apart or are remnants of another time. She focuses on the movement of light on the floor, or small, insubstantial motion elsewhere. Her slow minimalism invokes anticipation and disappointment, reverberation and echo. In addition to films, she has made drawings, books, photographs and sculptures, all of which remain in the handmade, analogue world. While her work has been compared to Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs of aging industrial relics and W.G. Sebald’s novels joining past and present, illustrated by old snapshots, it is perhaps closer to Eugene Atet, who methodically photographed the streets of Paris, fearful of their imminent ruin at the hands of modernity. He had faith that a world in decline could only be preserved in one way: with a camera.