Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation: Foam Talent 2024

The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation presents the group exhibition “Foam Talent 2024”. It comprises artistic positions by 19 emerging artists from 13 countries, providing extraordinary insights into current issues and discourses they are engaging with. In their photographic, film-based and installative works, the artists deliberately challenge traditional approaches and familiar points of view.

The exhibition is part of the Foam Talent programme, offering young artists a springboard for their future career while bringing current developments in contemporary photography to the forefront. The Photography Foundation has been supporting the talent programme as one of the main partners since 2017 and acquires works by one of the artists with each edition of the Foam Talent programme.

With determination and an impressive grasp of the complexity of our times, the artists in the exhibition reflect upon the dynamics, conflicts and contradictions posed by our globalised world. Among the themes addressed in their works are the invisible dangers of internet algorithms, the deconstruction of gender stereotypes and the lasting implications of colonialism. Their artistic methods are as diverse as the thematic range: the artists combine traditional photography with new technologies, delve into archives, bring forgotten stories to light, and experiment with digital imagery. Their varied approaches are a re-exploration of the medium’s boundaries, providing a glimpse at future developments. Thus, showing the ways in which photography may be used to visualise social and cultural dynamics, they invite viewers to reflect upon their own position in an ever-changing world.

Selected works from the exhibition

The following works are a selection of those included in the exhibition. They convey a sense of the formative influence of background, cultural rootedness and the questions of belonging and identity raised in many of the young artists’ groups of work. All artistic positions of this edition of the talent programme are presented online in a digital presentation.

Drawing on the influence of Catholic tradition in her native Bolivia, Marisol Mendez presents young women as either sinners or saints in her series “Madre”. Her expressive portraits play with this religiously influenced, stereotypical image of femininity, which is commonly associated with fragility and piety, contrasting it with forms of rebellion and sexually connotated motifs. Social expectations regarding the interplay between gender and identity are also at the centre of Ricardo Nagaoka’s series “Autobiographies”, depicting intimate black-and-white young male nudes – some posing, some in supposedly unobserved moments. Through the interplay of intimacy and distance, staging and vulnerability, Nagaoka explores the ambivalence of male physicality and the possibilities for self-expression beyond traditional masculine stereotypes. With the long-term project “The Longing of the Stranger Whose Path Has Been Broken”, documentary photographer Rehab Eldalil traces her own family history. Over a period of more than ten years, she closely collaborated with a Bedouin community in the south of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt whose nomadic lifestyle is shaped by nature, ancient customs and spiritual beliefs. Her photographs, complemented by traditional embroidery and poetry, portray the people as part of the surrounding landscape and thereby express the community’s deep connection to their environment.

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Family history

Thero Makepe’s project “We Didn’t Choose to be Born Here” weaves together his family history with that of South Africa and thus its Apartheid regime. The artist combines personal historical documents from his family’s archive with documentary photographs of South African and Botswanan landmarks and re-enacted portraits of his relatives. In an impressively personal way, the project reveals the effects of racism, land dispossession and displacement on individuals and communities. For his series “POST”, Sander Coers uses artificial intelligence to analyse old family photos of his grandfather and generate new, fictitious images in a similar style, thereby creating a completely imaginary family album with a nostalgic look and blurring the line between fiction and reality. The project “American Glitch”’ by Andrea Orejarena and Caleb Stein is inspired by “glitches” - optical illusions or errors that occur in real life, collected on the internet and discussed in online forums. The duo embarked on a journey across the United States in search of sites that reminded them of such optical phenomena. The resulting series shows calm yet enigmatic scenes that spark the question of what might be real and what might be fake.

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The Foam Talents 2024 are: Eleonora Agostini, Cristóbal Ascencio, Sander Coers, Rehab Eldalil, Xin Li, Akshay Mahajan, Thero Makepe, Marisol Mendez, Ricardo Nagaoka, Andrea Orejarena & Caleb Stein, André Ramos-Woodard, Aaryan Sinha, MAryam Touzani, Jaclyn Wright, Shwe Wutt Hmon, Cansu Yıldıran, Sheung Yiu and Amin Yousefi.

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