Netherworld Magazine h1

Work Descriptor
‘Zellige (ad infinitum)’
An infinity, a space between spaces. A quiet solitude in never-ending colour. Timeless battles in patterns of old and new. Hints of the modern age in the otherwise historic. The birth and majesty of masculinity and the woes that come with such a burden.
The multiplying compositions of ‘Zellige’ as an art form make the patterns mathematically infinite. In this piece the intricacies in each image interact with one other through their fluid merging. New patterns are created for fleeting seconds in this in-between space, a space we may inhabit.
Here are bodies against these patterns, the ‘Zellige’, that as an art form is created to be void of human presence. There is a pushing and pulling between the effeminate and the fiercely masculine. Slowly the patterns give way to scenes of battle, historical painterly images of crusades, with enslavement, amputation & death fervent in the disguise of vibrant patterned colour. Seemingly this colour makes it a visual celebration of past deaths, deaths we may overlook in this work. Thus the piece is more than the glorifying colour & pattern. Its complexities are rife, and may only ever be engaged with by select few who contemplate ‘Zellige’.
Biography
Miriam Chefrad is a political and conceptual photographer based in Glasgow. This piece, ‘Zellige (ad infinitum)’ continues her metaphorical and spiritual journeys through the mind and lens. Her work contemplates the contemporary versus the traditional, and is based on the use of symbolism and impact to challenge the conventions inherent in the world. The desire to produce work that disturbs the sleep of humanity and provokes much thought, drives her artwork.

website
facebook

Remaining noise
as Robert Doisneau said: Suggest is to create. Describe, is to destroy…


Ramzy Zahoual, born in 1984 Algeria, self-taught photographer, passionate about jazz and photography
ramzy.zahoual@gmail.com

‘Paradise’
In 2006 after living one year in Stockholm I started to work on my paradise essay. It’s my personal vision on the city and its people. My photographic approach is direct and intuitive.

The reality I’m showing has a grittier mood, an atmosphere that is different from the usual stereotype of Stockholm and Scandinavia.
Through symbolic images and the graphic language of black and white this essay became an intimate, under the skin view, that also talks for my feelings and emotion, my instant reactions of a place that is strongly related to me because of my family story. I’m born in Milan, half Swedish half Italian, and I’m living in Stockholm since 2005.

I want it to be an artistic document from our times, in a larger perspective, about western European urban culture, mainly focusing on the consumerist and capitalistic aspects.

Paradise stands for the illusion of this system.

Stockholm is a small European city, isolated from the rest of the continent. This research wants to show in a straight and simple way the daily life of the city.
The lens is mainly concentrated on people and on their environment, as architecture, atmospheres and details.
With a dark graphic style I want to recreate a less known atmosphere of the city, less paradisiacal than the usual stereotype.
This is a personal project, focusing on the normality and the daily life…trying to make it special and unique through photography.

A black and white poem of reality.

Joakim Kocjancic – born in 1975 in Milan, Italy. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and Carrara and gained a Masters in photojournalism at LCC (UK). He has lived and worked in several European cities. In 2006 he moved back to Stockholm and exhibited his work a number of times, the most recent shown in September 2012 in Galleri Kontrast with the series titled Stockholm Paradise. The exhibition is also going to be shown at FORMA in Milan next spring. Joakim has been a member of the photo agency Link Image since 2009. He has been selected twice at the International Foto Festival in Rome. In 2010 Joakim won the prize for best B&W Swedish photograph. He is also Anders Petersen’s personal printer. He is currently working on printing a set of Petersen’s photographs from Soho that are going to be exhibited at Paris Photo.

Bio and work description:
The work looks at migrants living in Calais who are trying to enter
the UK from France. Coming from War/poverty torn countries these
people are unwanted by Governments as they often lack skills or money
that are seen as ‘desirable’. I hope the work opens questions on
migration laws in Europe.

I am a photographer based in the South West of England. An Art’s
university College of Bournemouth graduate. My other interests include
records, books, cooking and Aston Villa.

Jameson Kergozou

In The Shadow of Nowhere

Since its launch, Google Maps has averaged over 100 million unique users a month making it the most popular geographical research tool in the world. However, on the request of organisations and governments, the service openly omits data on sensitive locations and structures. This digital censorship ranges from simple pixelisation, to the removal of locations entirely. Since the increased threat of global terrorist activity, many official powers believe that the censorship of satellite imagery is a necessary and unavoidable course of action.

From October 2011 to September 2012, digitally censored locations within the UK, The Netherlands and Hungary were documented and photographed. The effect of these restricted areas on the surrounding landscape form a central point of the study. This influence works to create deliberatly benign environments that are of little interest to those who traverse them. However, this benality often falters to reveal clues as to what lies just out view.


Guy Prowse is a documentary Photographer based in Manchester, UK. Guy was born in 1985 in Bristol and studied at the University of Wales Newport from 2009 until 2012. His work centres on the roles of history and government within a contemporary society.

Guy Prowse

Nightwatching continues the photographer’s fascination with portraiture but it is also based on Sylwia Kowalczyk’s own experience of loss of eyesight. Rather than directly trying to replicate visual impairment or describe any dramatic personal story, the work uses devices to describe a psychological state where seeing is compromised.

The work deliberately references the distortions that originate in Polish Baroque art, especially the coffin portraits of the 18th century. In the modern digital age where we are scarcely capable of believing our eyes any more, the work shuns any digital manipulation but instead makes use of a bizarre reality giving rise to a trompe-l’oeil captured faithfully on film. The project stems from an Eastern European approach to image-making in a photography world shaped and dominated by Western society’s attitude to imagery.

Bio
Sylwia Kowalczyk was born in Poland, and before moving to Scotland 4 years ago she was first studying at Krakow Academy of Fine Art and then working in Krakow as a graphic designer, illustrator and photographer.
In 20010 she graduated with an MFA in photography at Edinburgh College of Art. Her project ‘Temporal Portraits’ was selected for reGeneration 2 – a showcase of 80 most promising photographers in the world selected by curators of Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne for a book by Thames and Hudson, and was picked up by The Photographers’ Gallery in London for their selection of the best graduates in the UK, Fresh Faced and Wild Eyed 2011.

Sylwia Kowalczyk

Ardara and On

Photographs by Magali Duzant

The photographic series Ardara and On began as an exploration into the process of aging and finding a right in the world. This right refers to a confidence that can be difficult to ascertain in one’s twenties; it is a confidence in place, in plans, in self. There has been much talk of extended adolescence and a general societal unease with the situation that many twenty-somethings find themselves in.
Upon following a path that led to California, the project became as much about personal growth and the difficulties that it can bring as it is about the landscape of California and how place influences ones’ desires and actions. It feeds into an American stereotype; the West as a place of possibility and new beginning coupled with a feeling of disillusionment in that idea; a feeling of loss, all placed within a storied and cinematic setting.
These images illustrate the ways in which a new place is seen and felt on ones’ own viewed through the prism of combined personal experience and cinematic tropes. There is an underlying loneliness and a deep feel for the last light of the day. California is depicted as the proverbial film set that it so often manifests itself into. It carries an aspect of tension as well as one of fantasy; where fears and uncertainties lurk below the surface; the face of which plays into popular imagination – California as the pliable new.

Magali Duzant is an artist working in New York City. Her work deals with notions of light and landscape. She is an MFA candidate in Photography at Parsons The New School for Design. She holds an interdisciplinary degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Fine Art and Visual Culture. Her work has been exhibited internationally – most recently in NY, Boston, San Francisco and Beijing. She was named one of 2010′s Emerging Photographers Of the Year by Philadelphia-based Project Basho and was an Artist-in-Residence at the Kala Art Institute from 2011-2012.

Magali Duzant

/ Biography /

Yi-Jin Hsieh

In darkness, we see the light.

After discharged from hospital, I started to seek for the experiences on the obscure side.

Physical illness caused unknown fear of not being able to control the body. The hospital
was a space that had no time limit. While the body moved like a crippled, the spirit
wandered peripatetically.

————————————————————————————————————————

The necessity of concealment.

To reveal the mystery behind everything, and persistently keep making more “myths”.

The photographed bodies are no longer themselves per se, and the objects are also beyond
their ontological existence. I myself become a part of them, therefore transfer myself into a
new being.

Overly self-conscious of myself as a fragmented existence, I could only feel the fullness of
“me” when entering the twilight zone between self and others.

/ Concept /

Low-Fi Poetry

(The photographs were initially taken from a digital camera, and thus were retaken with
the camera through the screen of a CRT monitor. Though the details were reduced, they
had new appearances differed from before.)

Before my sight, the illusory reality paradoxically became the evanescent single frame
captures from the movies made by unrelated others. The ultimate essence of existence
consequently converted into the airy appearance far from reach.

The series driven by intense ambivalence is at the initial stage for the time being. It
will disclose the artistry in sadomasochism under human’s somnambulistic state.

————————————————————————————————————————

Ravings

The visions of torturing my leofman occur to my mind incessantly. To make his divine
beauty immortal, I set an altar covered with blood red veil and worshiped him while he
performed the dance in a trance. I even visualize to incise the epidermis of his delicate
skin, the splendid violet blood will dribble like tears from the wounds lentamente through
the blade of the gliding dagger.

Nevertheless, fear came over him inchmeal. ”Would the plot get out of control?” he
whispered. Then I told him it was just our debut.

Yi-Jin Hsieh

Lights and Lines

In this particular project my aim was to portray the relationship between human beings and their urban surroundings. A big city sometimes can be just overwhelming – here people tend to disappear in their everyday isolation.
The city in this case is represented by negative spaces eating up the frame and the people. Darkness is my medium to achieve this effect.
Some of the locations were carefully selected – I was looking for bridges or buildings that would only let a shard of light pass through at a certain moment of the day (The bridge in Finsbury Park at 6 pm, the Centre Point at 1 pm etc.) while others were just improvised.
In terms of inspiration this project owns a lot to Harry Callahan and Ray K. Metzker , two of my favourite photographers. The main reason is their use of shadows and small sources of light in order to create a narrative made of negative spaces.

Marco Barbieri
Born: 1980 in Bologna, Italy
Resident in London, UK

Marco Barbieri

Plačky were professional mourners that used to be an essential part of the Slovak funeral ritual. They were hired by the family of the deceased and would start the mourning process by coming to the house where the body was laid out and lament until the day of the funeral. The ritual was seen to have magical powers that would secure a respectful and definite leave of the deceased’s spirit from the house and from this world. Plačky were usually older women – often widows that did this in return for financial remuneration but also for beans or wheat.

IPG is an experimental collaborative project of Tamara and Yoshi Kametani. Yoshi and Tamara started IPG in 2010 and they currently live in New Jersey. IPG’s projects are initiated by personal interest and curiosity for experience.

IPG project