Alix Marie, Lebohang Kganye and Mia Liu in conversation with Anna Dannemann
(c) Mia Liu, Shifting Landscape V, 2015
07th May 2024
An online panel discussion on challenging the form of photography, with artists Alix Marie, Lebohang Kganye and Mia Liu (who will exhibit at Photo London 2024’s Discovery with UP Gallery), three artists working on different continents who employ photography as matter and material to sculpt, mould and defy expectations. Moderated by Anna Dannemann, Senior Curator at The Photographer’s Gallery.
Speakers
Mia LIU is a visual artist who lives and creates in Taipei. After receiving her B.F.A. from San Francisco Art institute, she enrolled in the M.F.A program, Hunter College of the City University of New York. Her works have been exhibited across major art museums and art spaces and collected by many throughout Europe, America, and Asia, including the Uli Sigg Collection (Switzerland) and the Emile Hermès Collection (Taiwan).
Her art focuses on finding poetry in the ordinary, exploring the mysterious connections of sensation, memory, nature, and culture, using material-sensitive techniques to give form. It embodies both the philosophical contemplation of the present and a subtle exploration of the delicate connection between the “past” and the “possible future” through a reexamination of art history. While the artistic forms appear diverse, they are not constrained by any medium, forming a unique Drawing system.
The “Ink Dialogue” project initiated in 2019 blends anonymous Chinese painting, pencil drawings, contemparay fabrics, and framing craftsmanship, paving the way for a new direction in contemporary ink painting. The 2022 “Scapes in the Mist” series integrates imagery with paper sculpture, engaging in a dialogue between my past unique forms and the history of photography. The purpose of these dialogical works is not historical excavation but to extract new cultural values from tradition, invoking a pure aesthetic sense—a crucial exploration in her personal artistic journey amid the fading trends of contemporary art discourse.
(c) Gabby Laurent
Alix Marie (b.1989 in Bobigny) is a French multidisciplinary artist, working mostly across photography, sculpture and installation.
Her work explores our relationship to bodies and their representation, through processes of fragmentation, magnification and accumulation. She has demonstrated a particular interest in addressing gender stereotypes while working on the persistence and influence of myths. Metamorphosis; of bodies, of mediums, of and within stories is at the center of her practice.
She graduated from Central Saint Martins College in 2011 with a first class degree in fine art and later completed an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art (2014).
In 2019 she was awarded the Vic Odden Award by the Royal Photographic Society for a notable achievement in the art of photography by an artist aged 35 or under.
Recent exhibitions include: Spiritual Urgency, Stedelijk Schiedam (2022), Styx, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (solo, 2022), Sorsi Di Sale, Ncontemporary, Milan (solo, 2022), Raw, Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam, (2022), Sucer la nuit, Musée des beaux-arts, Le Locle (solo, 2019).
(c) Andile Buka
Lebohang Kganye (b. 1990, Katlehong, South Africa) lives and works in Johannesburg. Kganye received her introduction to photography at the Market Photo Workshop, in Johannesburg, in 2009 and completed the Advanced Photography Program in 2011. She obtained a Diploma in Fine Arts from the University of Johannesburg in 2014 and is currently completing her master’s infine arts at the Witwatersrand University. Primarily known for her photography, Kganye often incorporates the archival and performative into a practice that centres storytelling and memory as it plays out in the familial experience. Notable awards include the Grand Prix Images Vevey 2021/22, Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize, 2020, Camera Austria Award, 2019 and the finalist of the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Arts Initiative, 2019. In 2022, Kganye was selected as one of three leading contemporary artists to represent South Africa in the 59th Venice Biennale. As winner of the Foam Paul Huf Award 2022, in 2023 Kganye held her first survey exhibition ‘Haufi nyana? I’ve come to take you home’ in Europe at Foam, Amsterdam. A solo exhibition ‘Shall you Return Everything, but the Burden’ of Kganye’s newly commissioned works were currently presented by the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, Cologne.
Anna Dannemann is an art historian and Senior Curator at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including the annual Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize; Helen Levitt: In the Street (2021 with Walter Moser); Simon Fujiwara: Joanne (2016); Charlotte Dumas’ Anima & The Widest Prairies (2015); Viviane Sassen: Analemma (2014); Feminist Avant-Garde (2016, with Gabriele Schor) and Four Saints in Three Acts (2017, with Patricia Almer & John Sears). She has curated numerous international and touring exhibitions as well as public displays, including Radical Imagination – Seven international women photographers (2022) and Christian Thompson: Being Human Human Being (2022). She regularly edits catalogues and writes texts for art publications.