During Paris Photo 2022 The Ravestijn Gallery presents 5 artists in the online viewing room: Inez & Vinoodh (NL/US), KYoung (UK), Eva Stenram (SE), Theis Wendt (DK), and Tereza Zelenkova (CZ).
A horse rests on a grassy moor, three human limbs – clothed and booted – protruding from its underbelly. The folds of a draped curtain consume another body, leaving only thighs and calves and stiletto-clad feet in view. Elsewhere, the fragments of the female form are swallowed up by a wooden filing cabinet – both spliced and dislocated, and locked within the oppressive confines of a tired institutional office.
Combinations of austere black and white, vintage textures of wood and fabric, and alien bodies – concealed or disjointed – establish an eerie feeling throughout The Ravestijn Gallery’s viewing room at Paris Photo 2022. From Tereza Zelenkova’s solemn figures, veiled in lengths of hair or cloth, to Eva Stenram’s monochrome photo-manipulations, where vintage pin-ups skirt the viewer’s gaze, the unsettling undertones are hard to ignore.
Visual associations unfold between five distinct artistic voices. The mahogany hues and wooden textures of Stenram’s Sideboard Survey recur in KYoung’s Filing Cabinet, as well as in Theis Wendt’s illusory Excavation no. 9 – a portal leading somewhere else, or an escape perhaps? Though poised and patiently awaiting the camera, the identities of the half-depicted subjects – in works by KYoung, Eva Stenram, Tereza Zelenkova and Inez & Vinoodh, never fully surface. We’re left to ponder who they are, who they were, and what became of them.
