Böcker utgivna av Skira

This volume presents the works of Kerunen and Sekajugo, whose dual ways of making art, despite their different aesthetic approaches, find common ground in their respective visions of materiality and form. Says Shaheen Merali, curator: "Radiance. They Dream in Time refers to the essential knowledge and lived experiences of Kerunen and Sekajugo in speaking to the many different territories of Uganda as well as to urban trade and living conditions in its urban centres. Both artists have been actively working with formal and informal archives of Uganda's dynamic visual culture". Acaye Kerunen's process as a socially engaged artist foregrounds the work of local and regional Ugandan craftswomen, celebrating them as integral collaborators and elevating the artistic practices of local artisans who are the gatekeepers of their local wetlands, drawing upon a sacred and unspoken knowledge of ecological stewardship. By deconstructing utilitarian materials and artisan crafts, Kerunen repositions the work in order to tell new stories and posit new meaning. The act of re-installing these deconstructed materials is a response to the agency of women's work in Africa and an acknowledgment of the role that this artistic labor plays in the climate ecosystem. Collin Sekajugo approaches his work from a distinct, aesthetic departure point that resides in his repeated return to pop culture and the omnipresent influence exuded by the global mainstream, conversing and critiquing its many biases across visual, oral and digital cultures. Since 2012, Sekajugo has worked with the manipulation of the common stock image to reveal its inherent biases of entitlement and privilege largely modelled on the Western self. Sekajugo's artistic practice highlights a contemporaneous anthropological reversal of this mainstream culture through the lens of a decidedly African sense for irreverence and play on the ad-hoc. Conceptually, the works of Sekajugo become pure theatre, a hacking of identity that exposes some truths behind these stock images that quietly continue to colonise the entire globe by the weight of their own popularity.

The long Pax Tokugawa was founded on the blood of 40,000 severed enemy heads. Indeed, 1600 marked the end of the period of wars that saw the defeat of the troops opposed to General Ieyasu Tokugawa. The absence of wars, banishing the memories and horrors of past massacres, favoured the development of epic tales that gave rise to dark and terrifying atmospheres, such as the game of the hundred candles, a test of courage in which a handful of warriors meet on a summer night to tell each other scary stories populated by monsters from the national tradition. So we have the Joro¯ gumo, comely women who reveal their true nature as enormous spiders to their victims; the Tanuki, endearing badgers able to transform themselves; the Bakeneko, monstrous cats; the Kappa, aquatic beings that pester women; the Ningyo, mermaids whose fragrant flesh can give men renewed youth or an excruciating death. The macabre ritual of the hundred candles is the great idea behind this original project that presents 200 works from the 18th and 19th centuries, including prints, rare antique books, clothes, weapons, swords, a samurai suit of armour, as well as seventy-seven precious netsuke, small ivory sculptures, from the Bertocchi private collection and a ten-metre long scroll that tells the story of Shutendoji, a mythological creature (Oni) at the head of an army of monsters that haunted Mount Oe near Kyoto. Published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Villa Reale in Monza, the book is a real journey of discovery of Japanese imagery, ranging from Hokusai¿s famous manga notebooks (alongside his other masterpieces) to the works of Loputyn, the contemporary illustrator well known to hotaku manga enthusiasts.

This book examines a selection of paintings by Bernardino Luini (ca. 1480/85¿1532) that were influenced by Leonardo da Vinci (1452¿1519). Comparative analysis shows that Luini, from adopting Leonardös compositions and motifs, went on to incorporate elements of his style and expression in a group of works dating to the 1520s. These are the focus of the book. In imitating Leonardo, Luini traded complexity for clarity, simplifying his manner and making it accessible to a broad audience undifferentiated by age, gender, or class. The artist¿s method of popularizing Leonardo, however, led to criticism of his works as merely derivative, but that fails to consider their function as devotional images. Beyond church teachings and practices, little is known about how ordinary viewers looked at religious art in this period. Their responses are not recorded. But Luini¿s paintings themselves provide clues, like the foregrounding of the figures and their interaction with each other and the beholder, to indicate how they served a devotional purpose. The artist may not have been an intellectual like Leonardo, but the thinking inherent in his works is absolutely coherent and consistent. Their clear organization and unequivocal meaning effectively communicate the religious message he sought to convey. This book revisits the idea that Leonardo da Vinci was the essential inspiration for his younger contemporary Bernardino Luini. Instead of a broad notion of Leonardös influence, however, the book offers a more complex understanding of the relation between the two artists, one that seeks to account for Luini¿s much-criticized lack of originality vis-à-vis the older master. In one artistic category in which Leonardo offered few models ¿ devotional images of the Passion of Christ ¿ Andrea Solario, himself influenced by Leonardo, had a decisive impact on Luini. Solariös influence complemented Leonardös, enabling Luini to set a new standard for depicting a broad range of sacred subjects.

This book examines a selection of paintings by Bernardino Luini (ca. 1480/85¿1532) that were influenced by Leonardo da Vinci (1452¿1519). Comparative analysis shows that Luini, from adopting Leonardös compositions and motifs, went on to incorporate elements of his style and expression in a group of works dating to the 1520s. These are the focus of the book. In imitating Leonardo, Luini traded complexity for clarity, simplifying his manner and making it accessible to a broad audience undifferentiated by age, gender, or class. The artist¿s method of popularizing Leonardo, however, led to criticism of his works as merely derivative, but that fails to consider their function as devotional images. Beyond church teachings and practices, little is known about how ordinary viewers looked at religious art in this period. Their responses are not recorded. But Luini¿s paintings themselves provide clues, like the foregrounding of the figures and their interaction with each other and the beholder, to indicate how they served a devotional purpose. The artist may not have been an intellectual like Leonardo, but the thinking inherent in his works is absolutely coherent and consistent. Their clear organization and unequivocal meaning effectively communicate the religious message he sought to convey. This book revisits the idea that Leonardo da Vinci was the essential inspiration for his younger contemporary Bernardino Luini. Instead of a broad notion of Leonardös influence, however, the book offers a more complex understanding of the relation between the two artists, one that seeks to account for Luini¿s much-criticized lack of originality vis-à-vis the older master. In one artistic category in which Leonardo offered few models ¿ devotional images of the Passion of Christ ¿ Andrea Solario, himself influenced by Leonardo, had a decisive impact on Luini. Solariös influence complemented Leonardös, enabling Luini to set a new standard for depicting a broad range of sacred subjects.

On the Move features three different groups of nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists in three vastly different regions ¿ the Central Sahara in Africa, the Arabian Gulf and the Central Eurasian steppes ¿ highlighting crosscutting themes relevant to contemporary concerns about the human condition and our planetary future. The book shares lessons we might learn from the ways of pastoral nomads, such as living lightly on the land and working creatively with and through the sometimes challenging natural environments within which they move and know intimately. Themes under exploration include mobility and self-sufficiency; materialism, consumerism and environmental destruction; the potency of experience-based knowledge both practical and richly imaginative; and how the concepts we use affect our appreciation of cultural differences. The book seeks to highlight the gap between the ways these groups see and understand themselves and the stereotypes - both negative and romantic - by which outsiders (from travellers and architects to ecologists and state officials) have represented them or sought either to appropriate or to control and change them. Working against tendencies to view such groups as timeless or remnants of the past, this exhibit follows a historical approach, juxtaposing different historical periods to show how the pastoralists¿ ways of living and possibilities for flourishing have been affected by both environmental and political forces, specifically from key ruptures of the past century. At the same time, it suggests that we have much to learn from the pastoralist way of life.

On the Move features three different groups of nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists in three vastly different regions ¿ the Central Sahara in Africa, the Arabian Gulf and the Central Eurasian steppes ¿ highlighting crosscutting themes relevant to contemporary concerns about the human condition and our planetary future. The book shares lessons we might learn from the ways of pastoral nomads, such as living lightly on the land and working creatively with and through the sometimes challenging natural environments within which they move and know intimately. Themes under exploration include mobility and self-sufficiency; materialism, consumerism and environmental destruction; the potency of experience-based knowledge both practical and richly imaginative; and how the concepts we use affect our appreciation of cultural differences. The book seeks to highlight the gap between the ways these groups see and understand themselves and the stereotypes - both negative and romantic - by which outsiders (from travellers and architects to ecologists and state officials) have represented them or sought either to appropriate or to control and change them. Working against tendencies to view such groups as timeless or remnants of the past, this exhibit follows a historical approach, juxtaposing different historical periods to show how the pastoralists¿ ways of living and possibilities for flourishing have been affected by both environmental and political forces, specifically from key ruptures of the past century. At the same time, it suggests that we have much to learn from the pastoralist way of life.

The COVID-19 Visual Project. A Time of Distance began life as a multimedia platform with the aim of becoming a permanent archive on the pandemic. In its entirety, it is a collection that includes a variety of content aimed at recounting the health crisis, the social and individual consequences and the economic impact that characterize this unexpected period in history. A platform where internationally renowned photographers and video makers, visual artists and journalists, leave their indelible mark. The images touch upon the most important themes linked to the pandemic, such as the health crisis, empty cities, lockdown, the economic effects, social sacrifices and personal consequences, nature's recovery and the new normal. The book, edited by Arianna Rinaldo, seeks to be a compendium of this period of history distinguished by unique events that have touched different parts in the world in the same way, producing side effects characterized by cultural and social particularities. Punctuated by chapters on different themes, A Time of Distance aims to portray the events, reactions and widespread mood, without seeking to be exhaustive, instead offering a wide range of stories from different places around the world. The ultimate objective is to be a testimony and a space that collects significant visual accounts of this historical phase, to which we can return to try to understand what happened, how and why; and to remember a period during which humanity as a whole was forced to press "pause" as one. A Time of Distance puts itself forward as the "repository" of a collective historical memory, to help prevent us from forgetting the time of separation that we all had to live through and which we all sought to survive, each in our own way.

One of the key figures in Japan¿s pivotal Mono-ha phenomenon of the late 1960s and early 1970s, artist Kishio Suga has realized a visionary practice of ephemeral, site-specific installations and performative interventions into the everyday environment. Writing is an important mechanism in Sugäs artistic process, and his output spans aphoristic statements, fragmentary notes, art criticism, theoretical essays, and detective novels. Published in venues ranging from exhibition pamphlets to Japan¿s leading culture journals, Sugäs texts deploy barbed humor and gruff intellect to prompt readers to rethink their assumptions about art and knowledge. This volume, the second of a three-part anthology, features Sugäs writings from the period 1980¿1989. Having challenged institutional definitions of art through his formulations of the [thing] and being left a decade prior, Suga shifts his focus in the 1980s toward de-centering the human as the sole agent of perception. In particular, he embarks on a sustained investigation into the dynamics of periphery, which informs his work through to the present. Concurrently, the museum building boom that accompanied Japan¿s rise to economic superpower in the 1980s precipitated a broad historicization of post-war Japanese art, and Suga devotes several important essays to reflection on Mono-ha. He also revisits his unpublished notes in a series of fragmentary texts, culminating in a retrospective compilation of aphoristic statements for his monograph Kishio Suga: 1988¿1968.

Henri is a free artist. His eclectic, versatile practice has led him to work with sculpture, painting, graphics, mosaics and ceramics, with an authentically exploratory approach. Henri is a living testimony to art understood as inspiration and expressive vitality. Henri's style is characterized by a refined expressionism accentuating the physical features of human and animal figures, distorting muscles into tensions, nerves, cheekbones, and fibres, yet always averting grotesque, caricatural and obscene outcomes. This accentuation of physiognomic features, profiles, grinding, nodules, is the most distinctive trait of his production. But his works are never caricatures, farces, or jokes. Henri is an artist taking human and animal features where harmony and physical composure dissolve, fall apart, and become an inner expression, a state of mind, a symbol. Henri does not create figures, but psychic states.

Published on the occasion of the solo exhibition devoted to Otobong Nkanga(Kano, Nigeria, 1974; lives and works in Antwerpen, Belgium), among the most important international contemporary artists of African origin who tackles urgent issues related to the ecological crisis and the environment, the exploitation of resources and sustainability, from a point of view that takes into account the history of colonialism with the consequent inequalities and repercussions on the social fabric. Through a multidisciplinary approach and the use of expressive languages, such as sculpture, tapestry, drawing, video, photography, participatory projects and performances, in her works Otobong Nkanga explores the natural traces and the social and cultural dimensions of the human being, in a network complex of relations with the territory. Her works address urgent issues related to the ecological crisis and the environment, the exploitation of resources and sustainability, exploring the stories of colonialism and new forms of material art. The monograph focuses on a new project, a site-specific installation designed for the five rooms of the third floor of the Castello (approximately 750 square meters). The installation includes two large carpets with irregular shapes inspired by minerals such as quartz and malachite, whose healing properties have been known since ancient times. Long hand-woven ropes branch off from each carpet, crossing the exhibition space. A number of objects and elements, both organic and handcrafted, are tied to the ropes, offering the experience of a relational environment, in which visitors can benefit from the healing and beneficial properties contained in the specific objects, becoming co-authors of new stories who in turn redesign the space.

The third volume of the catalogue raisonné of Enrico Castellani accompanies the other two volumes published in 2012, which document his works made between 1955 and 2005, and completes the cataloguing regarding the practice of this artist, who died in 2017. The volume, in Italian/English, divided into various sections, gathers his works on canvas, sculptures, high reliefs and installations registered with the Archive of the Fondazione Enrico Castellani and not included in the previous two volumes of the catalogue raisonné (Skira, 2012). The book is arranged chronologically to follow the authorised cataloging and carries forth the work begun by Renata Wirz, who died in 2016, and promoted by Castellani himself, with whom the publication process and work verification was agreed upon for this final and third volume. The book, promoted by the Fondazione Enrico Castellani, edited by Lorenzo Wirz Castellani and Federico Sardella and introduced by Hans Ulrich Obrist, together with the two previous publications, represents the vastest monograph dedicated to this artist¿s work and, in addition to being an essential tool in identifying his works, fully renders the spirit and modalities of the method of Enrico Castellani, whose final ten years of activity were especially prolific.

Designed in collaboration with the Weston family, this publication features over 80 works by the four photographers, leaving the leading role to the founder Edward Weston, with 40 of his pictures. These include almost all of his best known masterpieces: from his textural portraits to his nudes celebrating form, from his sand dunes to his plain objects transformed into sculptures, all the way to his famous close-ups of vegetables and shells, that have marked the history of photography of the last century, taking it from the late 19th- to early 20th-century pictorialist vision to an innovative modernist and surrealist figuration that made Edward Weston one of the absolute masters of world photography. Alongside his works, the book includes a selection of about 20 images by his son Brett, certainly the most determined in seeking a possible interpretation of his father's lesson, which he clearly found in landscape, a subject he studied and captured through geometries evoking abstract art. Cole Weston, represented by two further collections, on the other hand distanced himself from his father through the use of colour. Cara Weston - Edward's granddaughter who is still active today - is a refined black and white photographer, offering her personal contemporary take on classical themes.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition opening at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Galloping through Dynasties investigates the history of Chinese horse painting, a subject heretofore not adequately studied. The research has led to new insights into the evolution of Chinese horse painting in both its stylistic and symbolic contents and helps place Chinese horse paintings in their historical contexts through the political and social messages contained within them. Galloping through Dynasties, organized chronologically, explores the following themes: Celestial Horse and Imperial Horse Portraits in Early China, The Song Aesthetics and New Genres of Horse Painting, Transformation of the Horse Image in the Yuan dynasty, and The Symbolic Language of Horse Painting in the Ming and Qing dynasties. The catalogue offers new insights into not only how the Chinese define horses through their concept of nature, but also how Chinese horse paintings evolved in both their stylistic and symbolic contents and formed a symbolic language to convey political and social messages. The new findings on the historical development of Chinese animal painting filled a major gap and resolved much of the confusion in the symbolic contents.

Seen as a great artist in Colombia, elsewhere Bursztyn has remained relatively unknown. The publication is a comprehensive survey on pioneering art practice of Bursztyn and seeks to reflect on and animate new tendencies in research on Feliza Bursztyn and her vibrant body of work. It features texts by prominent writers, researchers and curators - Julia Buenaventura, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Camilo Leyva, Daniel Muzyczuk, Lucas Ospina, Sylvia Suárez, Gina McDaniel Tarver, Lynn Zelevansky - and rarely published archive materials. The publication inaugurates the Muzeum Susch and Skira Editore's series dedicated to re-discovering women artists overlooked by the main canons of art history. A pioneer in kinetic sculpture, Feliza Bursztyn (1933, Bogota-1982, Paris) created wrecked metal sculptures with ghostlike yet comical humanoid traits that addressed the social effects caused by the aggressive modernization of Colombian society. Composed of industrial junk, often motor-animated, these works perform a theater of dystopian industrial hybrids. Bursztyn's immersive installations are characterized by their disconcerting mechanical sound produced by the frenetic vibration of the sculptures, as well as by occasional music scores accompanying the pieces. The artist's works and sculptural mise-en-scènes enact sites of aesthetic resistance and antithetical political investment, creating a unique experience that raises awareness on the situation and the perception of women in a male-dominated society and reveal the troublesome face of modernity.

In 2015, the Graham Foundation, in partnership with the Chicago Architecture Biennial, presented Barbara Kasten: Stages, the first major survey of the work of the Chicago-based artist. The exhibition spanned her nearly five-decade engagement with abstraction, light, and architectural form. Since the 1970s, Kasten (b. 1936) has developed her expansive photographic practice through the lens of sculpture, painting, theatre, textile, and installation. Well-known within photographic and contemporary art discourse, the artist has recently begun to be reconsidered within the broader context of architectural theory. This book, Barbara Kasten: Architecture & Film (2015-2020), concretizes this legacy within the artist's practice and contextualizes her ongoing investigations into how moving images and perception play within and through architectural forms. Departing from Stages, the publication includes texts that encompass Kasten's work and exhibitions within the last five years while connecting to the artist's history of experimentations with light, including the influence of architect Le Corbusier, as well as site-specific responses to Shigeru Ban and Mies van der Rohe. Replete with full-colour plates, this book features a long-form interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, whose Chicago Marathon stage in 2019 was designed by Kasten; a two-part essay by artist Irena Haiduk on the construction of the camera and the artist's collaborations with corporate entities such as Polaroid; a feminist examination of the Bauhaus from architecture critic and curator Mimi Zeiger; relationships between Kasten's constructions and mid-century architects from Mexico and Brazil by Humberto Moro; and a speculative investigation into historical moments that provide a 'stage' through which to consider Kasten's formulations of space as cinema by editor Cristello.

Photographing Art presents a selection of photographs taken by the Mexican-German photographer between 1974 and 2018. An unmissable testimony of the world of contemporary art, with its emotions, relations, moments of joy and hard work, the encounters, the connections, and the sense of being part of a community lined with an artist's creative solitude. These are the contents and themes emerging from the pages of this book, a publication that is a testimony to its time, with its artistic expressions and everchanging trends. Photo-moments overlooked by news, media, art catalogues, and history of art, but immortalized by a close observer of the evolutions of contemporary research also thanks to his wife, the curator Adelina Cüberyan von Fürstenberg who can be credited for some of the most significant moments of international art. With his camera Egon witnessed what was going on in the art world but not from an institutional angle, capturing the facade, but immortalizing the spirit that made art and artists thrive. Attentive to every idea, detail or movement, every anticipated or unexpected moment, Franz Egon von Fürstenberg's camera captured the instant, the fleeting moment when a person feels free and natural, not framed or posing as a celebrity. The pictures in the book depict several artists, many of whom are among the most interesting personalities of our time, such as Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovic, Jannis Kounellis, Mario and Marisa Merz, Chen Zhen, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. Born in 1939 in Berlin, Franz Egon von Fürstenberg worked as assistant to designer Pierre Cardin in Paris and then to photographer Alain de Ferron in Geneva, where he met and married his lifelong companion Adelina Cüberyan. Over the years he collaborated with many artists and several art spaces around the world and his photos have been published in magazines, papers and art catalogues. His archives are a source of inestimable memories helping us understand the origins of those encounters, exhibitions, connections and developments that have unfolded throughout the generations over the course of four decades, giving rise to our present contemporary art world.

Much has been written about 16th- and 17th-century Italian painting, but the contribution of the women artists of that period has often been overlooked: extraordinary figures with incredible and often obscure personal stories. The Ladies of Art sheds light on these artists and their lives, on the role they played in their day, and how some of them made a name for themselves in the great international courts: extraordinary women, who overcame social stereotypes and who have not yet received the attention they deserve. This book describes the art and lives of thirty-four women artists, starting from Artemisia Gentileschi - the first woman artist whose work constituted a watershed able to question certain gender prejudices - followed by other famous Italian women painters, such as Sofonisba Anguissola -the Lombard painter appreciated by Van Dyck -, Lavinia Fontana, Fede Galizia, Marietta Robusti, known as "la Tintoretta?, and many others. Admiring the over 130 works on the pages of this book we can appreciate the artistic greatness of these long-forgotten artists as well as the problematic nature of a historical period that did not favour women's professional affirmation and recognition. Stories of women that offer a reading beyond stereotypes and capable of questioning behavioural models. Women who challenged prejudices, deconstructed restraining clichés, and who found their expression in painting.

For over 35 years Tasset has held a unique position in the lexicon of contemporary art with a remarkably diverse body of art. A self described art nerd, Tasset's imagery comes from his wide ranging knowledge and empathy for all types of art. He once said, "I'm not going for originality, I'm striving for the quintessential." The artist's spectacular objects unlock memories. He revels in demonstrating the similarity between the grandest artistic gesture and the humblest child's scribble. With a satirist disposition he interrogates institutions-galleries, museums, public art and even his own position of power. His art has intentionally quoted from high modernism, folk, vernacular and performance art. This egalitarian ethic has led to a diverse group of iconic artworks and beloved permanent public sculptures. Born in Cincinnati and spending the last forty years in Chicago, Anthony Tasset embodies a midwestern plain-spoken, kind hearted scepticism. Never passive, his art compels a reaction, it can be cutting, even cruel, but it can also be as tender as a Neil Young song, often at the same time. This 250 page, hardcover book contains 200 reproductions chosen by the artist, and extensive essays by Michelle Grabner and Andrew Russeth. In addition, Tasset has invited artists he greatly admires; Jeanne Dunning, Pamela Fraser, Judy Ledgerwood, Jose` Lerma, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Cauleen Smith, Phillip Vanderhyden and John Waters to chose and write on one of his works.

Finally on the way, the Catalogue Raisonné of Ceramic Sculptures is the most complete and updated publication exploring this fundamental ambit of Lucio Fontana's research and production. The result of a project shared with Enrico Crispolti, curator of the entire Catalogue Raisonné collection of Fontana's work, this impressive publication is edited by Luca Massimo Barbero - eminent scholar specializing in Fontana's oeuvre and curator of the Catalogue Raisonné of Works on Paper - in collaboration with Silvia Ardemagni and Maria Villa. An essential and updated research tool, this Catalogue Raisonné is the result of the painstakingly accurate archiving and cataloguing activities carried out by Fondazione Lucio Fontana over more than fifty years, presenting a selection of about 2000 ceramic works made between 1936 and 1966. Organized in chronological and thematic order, within the two formal "hemispheres" explored by Fontana's extraordinary earthenware production - the Figurative and the Spatial - works are accompanied by entries offering a precise listing of bibliographical and exhibition references. Page after page the volume explores the artist's vast creativity disseminated with experimentations finding an ideal expression in ceramic works investigating and putting into practice an ideal relation between form, colour, matter and space. The publication includes an extensive and analytical essay by Luca Massimo Barbero, offering an exact survey that for the first time highlights and defines Fontana's exceptional inventive capacity, as well as his role as key player in the 20th-century contemporary art scenario. For this occasion, bibliographical insights are paired with new research and studies on the author's biography.

Published on the occasion of burn shine fly, presented during the 59th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia 2022, the project title is derived from the book of poetry and prose You got to burn to shine by John Giorno, the late American poet and partner of the artist. The publication surveys a number of Rondinone's most iconic bodies of work brought together at the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, as well as insights to new work specifically created for this project; conveying the distinct sensitivity and site-specific discourse with which the artist approaches exhibition-making. Encompassing a diverse array of media, burn shine fly mediates themes that have come to define the artist's practice over the past three decades. Primarily the enduring exploration of the multivalent potentials for the physical to express the metaphysical, spiritual, and transcendental, of which he has stated: 'the work aims to coax the sublime from the subliminal. It should dazzle us and then send us into deep reflection about the marvels and mysteries of life.' Founded in 1261, Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista is the oldest known confraternity in Venice, and as such sustains the richness and diversity of the city's history. Located in San Polo district at the heart of the city, its walls have housed treasures ranging from venerated relics of the cross of Jesus Christ to works by Venetian Renaissance Masters including Titian, Vittore Carpaccio, and Giovanni Bellini.

In this new collection, the internationally exhibited and award-winning documentary and fine art photographer, David Lurie returns to the terrain of the city, but this time with a specific visual agenda in mind which he shapes with the eye for a carefully composed frame of both a documentarist and a fine artist. Lurie¿s new collection strikes at the very heart of the dilemma of unequal access to the technological means of production ¿ the digital sphere, usually reached via the ubiquitous smartphone. With his aesthetic eye, skilful sense of composition, lighting and colour and, most importantly, a keen sense of the topicality and socio-political importance of what is contained within his frames, in his new project Lurie visually dramatizes the explosion of cheap and available camera technology built into smartphones, which has coincided with a corresponding explosion of the platforms on which their images can be seen ¿ social media. This seemingly extreme democratisation of image making in fact also disempowers, by turning the data inherent in all images ¿ locations, faces, frequency of images, likes and dislikes ¿ into monetisable information to be harvested and deployed by social media corporations. Street photography started out as a means to document and thereby understand new ways of living that rapid urbanisation and industrial work and leisure practices had brought about. As a medium, street photography focused on popular culture and the working classes as a result. The novelty of having one¿s lifestyle and values disseminated photographically is a mainstay of the street photography idiom ¿ one that is now overshadowed by the ubiquity of its post-capitalist, self-initiated forms. This very ubiquity conceals the ideology behind a variable and radically unequal access to digital culture, still very much organised along class and racial lines.