On Tuesday 19 April 2016, Arendt & Medernach unveiled its new exhibition comprised of the works of six burgeoning female photographers as part of the law firm's initiative to promote young or established original artists from every geographical horizon.
Claudia Huidobro - "Tout Contre"
Born in Paris in 1963 to Chilean parents, Claudia Huidobro creates photography conceiving the body as "writing inside of a space". In blunt black and white, surrounded by low ceilings and unadorned walls, it is her disunited figures and the object they are given to interact with that take the focus in her photos, exploring the limits of the body by examining each individual, disconnected aspect of it. Catherine Poncin - "Entr'actes"
French-born photographer Catherine Poncin has taken her work far afield, working a lot in the Middle East with a new project in the pipeline to take place in Morocco. Her process is embedded in the notion of recreation, involving the use of anonymous and media photos or images she has found through archives and regenerating them, stimulating history and heritage anew. Corinne Mercadier - "La Suite d'Arles", "D'Arles la Suite"
"La Suite d'Arles", first exhibited in 2004, is made up of the enlarged polaroids of Paris-based artist Corinne Mercadier. In a similar vein to Claudia Huidobro, Corinne highlights the reciprocal action between object and person, asking her subjects to throw items she creates herself, such as gold printed books, before the camera as she takes her shot. The multiple person process blends choreography, theatre and film elements into a photographic end result. Anne-Lise Broyer - "Carnet d'A"
As the title (English: "A's Notebook") suggests, this collection by photography and typography graduate Anne-Lise Broyer forms part of a continuous series, first started in 1996, of images forming a collective "journal intime", or intimate diary. Taking inspiration from fiction, novels and their writers themselves, she seeks to evoke moments in life coming together to generate a kind of photographic literature, thoughtful images to be read. Isabel Muñoz - "El amor y el éxtasis"
Barcelona-born Isabel Muñoz first engaged in photography through studies in Photocentro at the age of 20. The non-linear shapes of twirling white-clothed toreros set against a stark black background are reflective of her world views on spirituality, evoking her interest in movement and 17th century mysticism. Her determination for "finding light when there is dark" has taken her around the world, to Syria, Iran, Iraq and Turkey. Katrien de Blauwer - "Collages"
Belgium's Katrien de Blauwer is not your average artist, with her collection the product of a "photographer without a camera". Rather, her pieces are press and fashion "cuts" from the 1920s-'50s, with colour highlighted by using old books as a background. Her collage dossiers, which began as moodbooks for fashion collections, later morphed into a process of self investigation through the collecting, cutting and recycling of images. She currently holds around 30,000 collages. The interior of the building itself is adorned with the works of artists previously showcased in past exhibitions, with the large scale portraits of Marie-Jo Lafontaine and the fragmented faces shot by photographers such as Margo Ovcharenko, Katharina Sieverding and Sebastiano Mauri bearing down over boardroom tables. Swiss visual artist Beat Streuli is the only exhibitor who has featured in two separate Arendt & Medernach display series and whose street photography and other works now fill an entire room at the law firm. Photos by Sarah Graham
Arendt & Medernach have been showcasing the photographic talents of artists from around the world since 2002, with a spokesperson for the law firm explaining that each temporary exhibition is established in an area of Arendt House at 41A, Avenue J.F. Kennedy in Luxembourg-Kirchberg, which makes it easily available for public viewing and the art as accessible as possible to the outside.
