This was the first time for The Ravestijn Gallery to show at the Art Paris Art Fair. After Asia, Art Paris Art Fair continues in its commitment to bring to light emerging art scenes. This year Africa is guest of honour. The Ravestijn Gallery presents two young and upcoming artists with each their own link to Africa: Alinka Echeverria and Nico Krijno.
Alinka Echeverria shows her series ‘Becoming South Sudan’. Prior to South Sudan’s independence from the Republic of Sudan in 2011, forty years of internal conflicts and two protracted civil wars had permeated the history of the country. ‘Becoming South Sudan’ is a compelling and hopeful visual story of the event.
Nico Krijno grew up in a small town in South Africa, before leaving for Cape Town to pursue his career in photography and film. Krijno layers, clones and blurs his images distorting these forms that rebel in the rich history of still life.
ALINKA ECHEVERRIA (MX, 1981)
Prior to South Sudan’s independence from the Republic of Sudan in 2011, forty years of internal conflicts and two protracted civil wars had permeated the history of the country. Established in 1956 at the end of the Anglo-Egyptian colonial rule, the Republic of Sudan had its borders drawn by its very European predecessors with little concern to the cultural and ethnic reality of the region. South Sudan’s independence allowed the borders to be reconfigured to extent. Regardless, the world’s newest nation remains in shambles, en masse. Its short history has demonstrated that internal solidarity along the ethnic lines has long lost its echo among the rivalries within the country’s ruling party, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM).
Artist Alinka Echeverría’s Becoming South Sudan arrests the momentum of the solemnity of the independence day preparations in the country’s capital Juba in June 2011. Arranged in three chapters, the series propound the idea of becoming as a mode of wearing; military and religious uniforms constitute the dynamic undercurrent between the subjects. While the costumes might propose a sense of national togetherness, what Echeverría delivers is actually strikingly intimate set of portraits that transcend the conventional patriotism of national consciousness; consciousness that in the case of South Sudan could not have been in any way fully realized concept back in 2011. The question remains whether it is that today.
Becoming also implies to any change concerning attainment of potentialities in classical Western philosophy. The word suggests a kind of movement from one level of potentiality to a level of higher actuality. Becoming is a process, an active flux that is never fixed in time. The dignity of Echeverría’s portraits, the tranquil, yet resolute looks of their subjects, seem to escape the historical moment in which they were captured. One cannot help but reframe Becoming South Sudan against the formative years of the independence. Echeverría points us to the taut anticipation of South Sudan’s future; none of her subjects are expressing joy. The very strength of Echeverría’s Becoming South Sudan is that its embryonic aptitude is constantly growing in potential. The symbolic order of her images is very much in a parallel transit in relation to the evolution of South Sudan.
Alinka Echeverría (b. 1981) is a British-Mexican photographer working on the cross-section of documentary and visual anthropology. She studied Social Anthropology and Development in University of Edinburgh before completing a degree in photography in the International Center for Photography in New York in 2008. Echeverría was the BMW Photographer-in-Residence at the Nicéphore Niépche Museum in 2015 and won the KALA Art Institute Fellowship Award in 2014 as well as the FT/Oppenheimer Funds Emerging Voices Award in 2015. Her work is part of the public and institutional collections of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Musée Nicéphore Niépce, BMW Art & Culture Collection, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Nelson Mandela Foundation in South Africa.
NICO KRIJNO (SA, 1981)
Nico Krijno grew up in a small town in South Africa, before leaving for Cape Town to pursue his career in photography and film. With a background in theatre and experimental video, his practice has a performative nature. Krijno has been considered one of a small international wave of artists to create a new photographic language. Photography that reflects the experience of viewing images online through platforms like Tumblr and Instagram. Platforms that bounce from image to image in a deconstructed cultural collage. Krijno hits at the space between photography and painting, using ephemeral sculptures as chords in the neo-photographic symphony he plays.
Krijno layers, clones and blurs his images distorting these forms that rebel in the rich history of still life. Constantly going against what we would expect from a photo, toying with the spatial illusions created by the camera. Challenging the materiality of photography itself. Sometimes, a landscape he captures is erased by Photoshop’s brush tool. In others his brush breaks apart a wood veneer to make it three-dimensional. “I want to show that the truth is not something simple, that there are not always clear and definitive answers” Krijno says.
The result is an intuitive way of looking at what surrounds us. Krijno’s subject matter is eclectic through his impeccable understanding of colour and composition. With forms ranging from vegetables and abandoned furniture to plastic waste. His work is at once hyperreal and magic, pointing at the banality of our existence with humor. Seen as more inventor then observer Krijno’s objects are part of his complex constructions. “I simply take what I find ‘around’, convert and transform this debris through a kind of creative alchemy into a theatrical mise-en-scene” Beauty is, for him, everywhere for those who are prepared to see it: he continues this day-to-day approach to art capturing and curating the world around him, adding his accidental poetic shots to the scrawling digital platforms.
His first solo show, ‘On How To Fill Those Gaps’ in Cape Town (2011) was widely lauded and followed by other group shows in New York, Milan, San Fransisco, Glasgow and London. He was nominated for the Paul Huf Award 2013 and his self-published book ‘Synonym Study’ was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award 2014.
