| | | | | | | | © Arielle Bobb-Willis, New Orleans, 2017
from The New Black Vanguard (Aperture, 2019) | | | | | | THE NEW BLACK VANGUARD | | | | Photography Between Art and Fashion | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ECAL - SMELLS LIKE QUEER SPIRIT | | | | l’ECAL/Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne dans le cadre du Bachelor Photographie. | | | | 5 February – 24 April 2022 | | | Through four exhibitions, the MBAL examines the themes of the fluidity of bodies, identities and nature. It brings together a range of outstanding artists from Switzerland, the United States, South Africa, Nigeria and Ethiopia.
GUIDED TOURS: Sundays 13 February, 6 and 20 March*, and 10 and 24 April at 2.30 pm
LA GRANDE TABLE: Sunday 10 April at 11 am
Digital art, artists, galleries, institutions, art collectors, art historians, what are we talking about?
The MBAL invites several specialists for a discussion.
MEETING WITH THE ARTISTS: Sunday 10 April at 1pm:
Tour of the exhibitions with the artists and signing of the book by Namsa Leuba. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | © Daniel Obasi, Moments of Youth, Lagos, Nigeria, 2019
from The New Black Vanguard (Aperture, 2019) | | | The New Black Vanguard | | | | Photography Between Art and Fashion | | | | | | | ... until 24 April 2022 | | | | The New Black Vanguard presents artists whose vivid portraits and conceptual images merge art and fashion photography, and break down long-established boundaries. Their work has been featured widely in fashion and society magazines, advertising campaigns and museums, as well as on their own social networks, re-instilling the contemporary visual vocabulary around beauty and the body with new vitality and substance. | | | | | | | | | © Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Hijab Couture), New York, 2019
from The New Black Vanguard (Aperture, 2019) | | | | | | | These images open up the conversation around the representation of the black body and black lives as subjects. Collectively, they celebrate black creativity and the hybridization of art, fashion and culture in the construction of an image. Seeking to challenge the idea that the black world is homogenous, the works serve as a form of visual activism. This is a perspective often found in this loose movement of emerging talents, who create photographs in very different contexts ¬– New York and Johannesburg, Lagos and London. The results ¬– often made in collaboration with black stylists and fashion designers – present new perspectives on the medium of photography and notions of race and beauty, gender, and power. | | | | | | | | | © Renell Medrano,from 1984, Harlem, New York, 2018
The New Black Vanguard (Aperture, 2019) | | | | | | This exhibition includes a selection of works by these groundbreaking contemporary photographers, as well as a wall of images created by other young black photographers who are contributing to the movement. Showcases of publications, past and present, contextualise these images and trace the history of inclusion and exclusion, in the creation of the black commercial image, while proposing a brilliantly rethought future.
An exhibithion conducted in collaboration with Aperture, New York. Curated by Antwaun Sargent. | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | © Namsa Leuba, Sarah, Lagos, Nigeria, 2015, (The New Black Vanguard) | | | | | | CROSSED LOOKS / REGARDS CROISÉS | | | | ... until 24 April 2022 | | | Namsa Leuba develops a powerful photographic work with her strange characters photographed in natural landscapes during her travels far from Europe. The African continent in particular exerts an almost magical fascination on the artist. The work eludes definition : is it documentary fiction, fashion images, performances or a vast investigation into non- Western identities?
For the past 10 years, the artist, born of a Guinean mother and a Swiss father, has used the photographic medium to question exoticism. Paying particular attention to postures, costumes, props and sets, she creates strong settings around her characters. For several years, Leuba has explored the Western imagination in relation to African cultures. The series Weke, produced in the Republic of Benin, the cradle of Vodou, features stories inspired by local animist traditions. In Tonköma, a series produced for a fashion brand founded by Ali Hewson and Bono (US), she has her models pose on a Johannesburg rooftop and plays on the contrast between the urban environment and her creatures on stilts. Inspired by the figure of the Nyamou from Guinean tradition and often described as «the devil in the sacred forest», the artist, who grew up between two cultures, plays here with the juxtaposition of identities that come into tension. In the Illusions series, made in Tahiti where the artist lived for two years, it is the myth of the vahine that is explored. In response to Paul Gauguin’s paintings, which contributed to the dissemination of the myth of exoticism in modern art, Leuba once again challenges us by focusing on the hybridization of genres in Polynesian culture. Her images are addressed to us – Westerners – and return us to the stereotypes of female beauty as they have been conveyed by the so-called tropical images. In Tahiti, the artist places her models, who belong to the «LGTBQ+» community, in the midst of a lush nature and associates the idea of beauty with the strangeness of bodies. | | | | | | | | | | © Namsa Leuba, Damien, from the series NGL , 2015 | | | | | | In her photographic work, Leuba creatively recreates scenes that evoke "otherness". Posing in costumes and settings imagined by the artist, her models embody characters who seem to come out of fantastic tales. Combining the Western imagination with representations of the "other", the artist has created a powerful work that questions our Western gaze.
A numbered edition signed by the artist, produced for the MBAL, is being released for the exhibition. The artist's first monograph, Crossed Looks, published in 2021 by Damiani, is available at the museum shop. Namsa Leuba's work is also featured in the exhibition The New Black Vanguard.
Namsa Leuba (Switzerland/Guinea, 1982), who holds a master's degree in art direction from the ECAL/École cantonale d'art de Lausanne and a postgraduate degree in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York, works between France, Switzerland and the African continent. The award-winning artist from Neuchâtel broke through on the international scene in 2011 with Ya Kala Ben, a series of photographs taken in his mother's native Guinea. Her work is regularly exhibited in Switzerland and abroad, including South Africa, Nigeria, Canada, South Korea and Spain. | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | © Erwan Frotin, Perle 8, 2014 | | | | | | | ... until 24 April 2022 | | | | For nearly twenty years, Erwan Frotin has been engaged in photographic research on plant, mineral and animal forms, while successfully completing advertising and editorial commissions. After graduating from the ECAL in 2002, a school where he influenced several batches of students through his teaching, Frotin has made a name for himself on the international scene, particularly through his still lifes.The wild flowers he immortalizes in a palette of shimmering colours are reminiscent of the herbariums made a century earlier by the German photographer Karl Blossfeldt. With his photographs of plants on a neutral background, Frotin is indeed part of the legacy of the famous New Objectivity photographer made famous by the book The Magic Garden of Nature (1932). Developing a work that navigates between the real and the surreal, Frotin photographs a repertoire of strikingly beautiful plant, animal and mineral forms in the camera. In addition to his meticulously composed studio still lifes, the photographer continues to explore the natural world by travelling around the world to Japan, Hawaii, Chile, Costa Rica, and India. As an artist who has developed a singular photographic style, Frotin creates images in wild places, paradisiacal locations that seem timeless and without human presence. Over the years, the artist has built up a cabinet of curiosities with an almost encyclopaedic ambition. This interest in nature links him to the early 19th century American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who saw it as a divine entity, and to the American Eliot Porter, a pioneer of colour photography, who fought to protect the environment by immortalising the beauty and diversity of the natural world. Frotin invites us to reconnect with the cosmos by allowing ourselves to be carried and transformed by these fragments from unknown territories. The universe poetically depicted by the artist offers an unconventional vision of nature and the beings that inhabit it. Because even when it comes to depicting humans, they are hybrids like plants. Through his work, the artist wishes to show the omnipresent fluidity of living beings. | | | | | | | | | | © Erwan Frotin, The Monkey, Numéro China, 2021 | | | | | | Invited by the MBAL, Frotin brings his catalogue of forms into dialogue on the walls of the museum. Under his gaze, plants, animals, minerals, landscapes and humans are interconnected. Fascinated by the beauty of nature, Frotin creates photographs of a strange and supernatural world in constant metamorphosis. Rétrovision refers to the ability to look back to the past and the origins of Earth. Here the images, anchored in a protean reality, paradoxically evoke a sci-fi setting. The notion of place and time escapes us completely, inciting our imagination to let us embark on unexplored territories similar to those that inhabit the unconscious. There is an idea of the sacred in Frotin's work. This flow of hypnotic images is a real invitation to meditation.
A book entitled FLUX 1, published by Note Note Editions, is released on the occasion of the exhibition.
Born in Toulon, Erwan Frotin (Switzerland/France, 1978) graduated as a photographer from the ECAL/École cantonale d'art de Lausanne in 2002, as well as studying biology and art history. That same year, he won the Grand Prix for photography at the Hyères Festival, which was quickly followed by his first commission for Vogue Paris. From then on, Frotin received commissions for Vogue Hommes International, Wallpaper, The New York Times Magazine, Another Magazine, Interview, System, and Dazed and Confused. He has also created campaigns for Asprey, Dior, Bergdorf Goodman, Louis Vuitton, Tsumori Chisato, Loewe and Apple. His work has won numerous awards and has been exhibited in Switzerland, France, Italy and the United States. | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | © ECAL /Lisa Mazenauer et Dominique Bartels | | | ECAL - SMELLS LIKE QUEER SPIRIT | | | | l’ECAL/Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne dans le cadre du Bachelor Photographie. | | | | Dominique Bartels, Julie Corday, Diego Fellmann, Florian Hilt, Samara Krähenbühl, Angèle Marignac-Serra, Lisa Mazenauer, Marvin Merkel, Inès Mermoud, Basil Pérot, Yolane Rais, Camille Spiller » | | | | ... until 24 April 2022 | | | | It is in the 1980s that Jean Paul Gaultier overturns dress codes and reveals the porous boundary between masculine and feminine. With playfulness, the fashion designer reverses roles, confounds gender and designs silhouettes that unite masculine sensitivity and feminine power. When they were launched, the brand’s perfume bottles also broke with the androgynous fashion of the 1990s. They have become iconic and are the starting point for the photographic explorations carried out here by the ECAL students. | | | | | | | | | | © ECAL/ Florian Hilt, Basil Perot | | | | | | For this research project directed by Florence Tétier and Nicolas Coulomb, the 3rd year Bachelor of Photography class is questioning the human body and its representations. The images created in 2021 by the 11 students of the ECAL are thought under the sign of pride and tolerance. Starting with the perfume bottle and the designer’s statements in favour of the degendered status of fashion, the photographers create different universes around the famous fragrance where nudes and still lifes rub shoulders. Playing with the fluidity of gender, the artists stage beings that blur the boundaries of male/female bipolarization. For these young artists, who are following the path opened thirty years ago by Jean Paul Gaultier, fluidity is not perceived as a negation of the sexes but as a true richness. When gender becomes more flexible, new potentialities are opened up. This works show that the commitment to a more inclusive society also passes through images.
An exhibition produced by the ECAL/Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne as part of the Bachelor of Photography programme, under the direction of Milo Keller. The images were created on the occasion of Pride Month, with the collaboration of Claude-Emmanuelle Gajan-Maull, consultant at the ECAL on queer issues.
A publication, co-edited by ECAL x JPG x Novembre, is published on the occasion of the exhibition. Graphic design by Baptiste Gerbelot Barillon et Jean Marques.
The project is realized with the assistance of Matthieu Croizier, Antoine Martin and Yul Tomatala. | | | | | | | | © ECAL/ Yolane Rais, Julie Corday | | | | | | unsubscribe here
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