Category: travel

Between the shadows, Katrin Koenning delicately reveals the connections and networks of love, sorrow, intimacy, and healing.

Spanning three years (2020-2023),  between the skin and sea emerges at a time of great collective upheaval. The hyper-local takes centre-stage; made among the artist’s immediate communities, tales of entanglement, relation, connection and intimacy unfold. Leaning into the shadows, the photographs trace networks of love, grief, kinship, shelter and repair.

Katrin Koenning (b.1978) is an artist living and working in Naarm/Melbourne. between the skin and sea is her first monograph.

In 1978, just months after meeting each other, Seiichi Furuya and Christine Gössler traveled to Bologna, documenting their first trip on Super 8. Seven years later, they returned to Italy, this time to Venice, which would be their last journey together.

In 1973, Seiichi Furuya left Japan for Europe on board of the Trans-Siberian train. He arrived in Austria where he first settled in Vienna, before moving to Graz where he met Christine Gössler in 1978. From this day forward, he started photographing her, in the intimacy of their home in Graz but also during their travels abroad — to Germany, England, Italy…and Japan, their most distant destination. Christine studied art history and worked for the radio, making documentary programs. After the birth of their son in 1981, she became increasingly involved in the world of theatre. As she was devoting herself to her acting lessons, she started to show signs of schizophrenia. Christine committed suicide in East Berlin in 1985.

Since Christine’s disappearance, Furuya has never stopped revisiting his archive. This initiative was presented in a series of five books entitled Mémoires, published between 1989 and 2010, and in Face to Face, published by Chose Commune in 2020. In 2018, Seiichi Furuya found super 8 film rolls in his attic. One of them was a recording of the very first trip he made with Christine, in Bologna in 1978 a few weeks after they had met. As an attempt to remember a trip he had completely forgotten about, Seiichi Furuya started extracting stills from the film, frame by frame. These images compose his new series First Trip to Bologna 1978. Together with this series, in the same book, we are releasing a newly edited version of Last Trip to Venice 1985, which was first self-published in 2002. This series presents photographs from Seiichi and Christine’s very last trip, before Christine took her own life.

Between Castelfranco Veneto in Veneto and Lecce in Puglia, the photographs of Irina Rozovsky and Mark Steinmetz dialogue with each other, following the rhythm of unexpected events and unique encounters.

In 2021, Irina Rozovsky and Mark Steinmetz were invited to take part in two photographic projects in Italy, one in Castelfranco Veneto (the Veneto region) and the other in Lecce (Puglia). The subject intended to drive the work was ‘nature’; a word with so many variations of meaning in the context of today’s diversified, fragmented landscape, which constantly reflects our lives as well as condition the way that we observe reality.

This book compiles a selection of the artists’ photographs of these two Italian regions so far apart from one another. These are places where nature reveals itself through different forms of expression and where the relationship between body and space, captured in a combination of light and shade, seems to take on an inconsistent and sometimes absolute value.

Insieme (together) tells of a photographic experience in Italy that was composed in the form of an intimate, personal diary. With the artists’ dual gaze gently organizing a narrative structure, Rozovsky and Steinmetz’s photographs sit alongside one another, alternating and rotating in harmony with a discontinuous, fluctuating rhythm, just as in life’s episodes. These pictures, which seem almost poised to capture unexpected events and unusual encounters but especially moments of a shared daily life, express a singular familiarity with the places being found, conveying the natural character of their authenticity.

Biographies

Irina Rozovsky (born in 1981 in Moscow) studied at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Massachusetts.
She makes photographs of people and places, transforming external landscapes into interior states. She lives in Athens, Georgia, USA where she and her husband Mark Steinmetz run the photography workshop space The Humid.

Mark Steinmetz (born in 1961 in New York) lives in Athens, Georgia. He graduated in photography from Yale University in 1986. Working mainly in series, his black-and-white photographs evoke a variety of subjects, from the innocence of small-town children and teenagers in the American Southeast, to the bustling streets of Paris and the peaceful landscapes of Italian towns.

This print is part of a series of prints by 5 women photographers that we have previously published: Irina Rozovsky, Clémentine Schneidermann, Mikiko Hara, Moe Suzuki and Deanna Dikeman.

Around the Mediterranean, Massao Mascaro traces the journey of Ulysses and meets the exiles who inhabit Ceuta, Naples, Athens, Palermo, Istanbul, Tunis, and Lampedusa.

“Sub Sole (in Latin, beneath the sun), an ensemble of photographs made between 2017 and 2020, in the region of the Mediterranean Sea, follows the mythological itinerary of the voyage of Ulysses: Ceuta, Naples, Athens, Palermo, Istanbul, Tunis and Lampedusa. Crossroads of cultures, cradle of foundation myths, the Mediterranean is, today more than ever, marked by migrations, exile and displacement. Over the course of seven voyages and numerous chance encounters, Mascaro goes in search of the young people who inhabit and traverse this region. The literary narratives which the artist drew upon for his work are like the invisible companions of these photographs. They imbue the contemporary images with an ancient substance. Beneath the sun, political, economic, existential, and poetic implications intersect, beneath the harsh, hot Mediterranean light whose rhythm shapes human life.” Sonia Voss