TPG New Talent
TPG New Talent (TNT) was launched in 2019 by The Photographers’ Gallery as a way to identify and champion under-recognised or emerging UK-based artists and photographers who use photography as a key part of their practice.
It continues a tradition of programmes designed by TPG to support practitioners and confirms an ongoing commitment to ensuring new photographic practices are given a public platform.
Showing a range of approaches to both the medium and exhibition making, the artists selected for the first edition of TNT present works which encompass the full spectrum of photographic practices today. From the experimental to the documentary, both the works and presentations test the capacity and materiality of the form, using found imagery, surface manipulation, collage and 3D processes to document contemporary stories through personal memories and collective myths.
A long list of entrants was whittled down by TPG’s curatorial team, and then a final selection made by the American photographer and artist, Jim Goldberg.
In addition to the forthcoming exhibition showcase, the artists each receive twelve months of individual mentoring. Working with TPG curators to identify a particular area of their wider practice needing development and support, each artist will then be paired with a carefully selected mentor from the creative field, who will provide specific and ongoing advice and tutelage. Over the course of a year the mentorship will include studio visits, meetings, discussion and critiques relating to their work.
In other words, a fantastic opportunity for young photographers and artists to get support and help with their careers.
Barely British
My first reaction on reading the wall label was a twinge of disappointment. I had caught the phrase about the scheme being for ‘UK-based’ artists and so mistakenly thought the show would showcase young British talent. Not at all. Of the eight finalists, only two are British and, given that the final judge was American (why an American?), I felt there was only a slender connection between the exhibition and Britain.
Barely photography
The next obvious point is that many of the exhibits aren’t narrowly about photography. To quote again, they ‘present works which encompass the full spectrum of photographic practices today… using found imagery, surface manipulation, collage and 3D processes…’ This explains why the eight finalists are not referred to as photographers, but as artists.
This, in itself, is an interesting fact to mull over. The leading gallery of photography in London (maybe in the UK) runs a competition for young photographers, but frames it as not being about photography per se, but uses a much broader definition to encompass all kinds of art, which may, or may not, use photographic processes or elements. Hmmm. This is good, open, imaginative and inclusive. But there is the slight implication that, these days, simple photography is not enough.
The eight artists
Rhiannon Adam (b.1985, Ireland)
Adam has produced a wall-sized montage about the remote Pacific island of Pitcairn.
Big Fence / Pitcairn (2015 to 2018) by Rhiannon Adam
Pitcairn is the last British Overseas Territory in the South Pacific and might ring a few bells because it was here that the mutineers from HMS Bounty settled after turning on the tyrannical Captain Bligh, and taking over the ship, as portrayed in numerous books and movies. More recently Pitcairn was in the news because of a child sex abuse scandal, which led to the conviction of eight men including the mayor.
Adam made the long journey to Pitcairn and, due to the infrequent shipping schedule, was caught there for three months. The island is a tiny volcanic strip measuring just two by one miles, and is several days sail away from the nearest airstrip. Weary of intrusive journalists and outsiders, the islanders were understandably wary of Adam’s interest and reluctant to be photographed.
To create this wall-sized installation Adam used expired Polaroid film to take some photographs, creating a sense of decay. The installation also combines blow-ups of newspaper articles, alongside stills from the various movie versions of the mutiny on the Bounty, contemporary colour photos, a glass case containing a model of the Bounty, as well as a book on a shelf jutting out from the wall, and headphones on which you can hear voices of some of the islanders Adam interviewed. As the curators pithily put it, ‘a selection of audio, archive and ephemera’.
The general idea is Paradise Lost. Whereas the 1950s movies portrayed Pitcairn as a tropical paradise, the child sex scandals exposed it as being just like anywhere else, sordid and in thrall to bullying perverts. The population of the island has nowadays dwindled down to 40 adults and one child. In other words, the island is doomed. Cheerful stuff.
Miguel Proença (b. 1984, Portugal)
Miguel Proença’s series of colour photos Behind the Hill investigates ancient religions and traditional healing.
Extracts from the series Behind The Hill by Miguel Proença
Proença set out to photograph individuals and scenes remote from our 21st century technological civilisation. The result is traditional colour photos masks, rituals and objects that offer their adherents and practitioners good health and prosperity, for example the guide to palm reading in the middle of the bottom row. And the photo, top left, of a boy wearing a bright red traditional mask is stunning.
Giovanna Petrocchi (b. 1988, Italy)
Opposite Adam’s wall-size collage from Pitcairn is this weird, striking and attractive assembly by Giovanna Petrocchi.
Modular artefacts, Mammoth remains (2019) by Giovanna Petrocchi
Petrocchi combines personal photographs with found imagery and hand-made collages with 3-D printing processes. She creates imaginary landscapes inspired by surrealist paintings, virtual realities and ancient cultures. Influenced by museum displays and catalogues, Petrocchi populates these landscapes with her own collection of surreal artefacts.
I really liked the images themselves, whether presented untouched, or distorted by the surreal addition of masks or limbs.
I liked the way the small, framed, colour images were pasted onto the larger black and white images, breaking up their flow and symmetry.
I liked the way glass cases stick out from the wall.
The curators reckon her work:
aims to question the very idea that culture can be contained by national boundaries and institutions, revealing instead an entity in constant flux, subject to transformative processes of migration and exchange.
Maybe. But my first, initial, visual and emotional gut reaction was how elegant and tasteful her assemblies were. Beautiful, even, if we may use that old-fashioned word.
Alberto Feijóo (b. 1985, Spain)
Feijóo’s work is at the more experimental end of the spectrum. He combines photography, collage, book design and model making, creating results which might be more associated with architects and engineers. Hence the unappealing plywood construction on display here.
New Babylon by Alberto Feijóo
Sparse, isn’t it? The coloured models didn’t do it for me, neither did the layout of the ‘rooms’ with coloured bits stuck on. Or the big plywood frame in the background with much larger colour photo montages stuck on it. Allegedly, it offers:
a space for the viewer to encounter the incorporated objects and images like a roaming character within an extended tableau.
And:
His structures are further inspired by artist Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon, which imagines a utopian city through the construction of a series of models.
As my son would say, ‘Meh.’
Alice Myers (b. 1986, UK)
Alice Myers works with photography, sound and video to engage with specific communities and places. Made over the course of two years in collaboration with refugees and migrants in Calais, Nothing is Impossible Under the Sun incorporates sound recordings, conversation transcripts, found snapshots, moving image, drawings and closely observed photographs.
Using her role as an outsider to observe how events unfold around the camera, Myers rejects neat linear narratives to evoke disorientation in both her book and video works. This mirrors the physical and psychological spaces that people without documents are consigned to.
The same bien-pensant motive, in other words, which fuelled many of the illustrators and writers featured in the recent exhibition about refugees and migrants at the House of Illustration.
Myers’ work was presented on three video screens which are impossible to capture on a stills camera like mine. When it comes to assessing art videos, it’s relevant that I used to be a television series producer. I hired and fired series directors. Every day directors sent me their showreels on spec, looking for work, which I would sit and watch. Sometimes these showreels were stunningly briliant. Some of the short pieces haunt me to this day. This explains why art videos have to be really outstanding to make an impression on me. These ones didn’t.
And they also didn’t register when compared with almost all the work by or about refugees in the House of Illustration show. Much of that was moving, brilliant and inspiring.
Seungwon Jung (b. 1992, South Korea)
This was the best body of work by far.
From the series Bark by Seungwon Jung
Jung prints fragmented photographic images onto fabric, then uses this as a surface to further work into, apply onto and remove from, different elements. Starting with a completely printed length of fabric, she then submits this to various physical processes including de-threading, unpicking, rethreading and reconfiguring.
The results are stunning. There’s a set of three framed smaller images which are lovely. But it is these two big works, attached to scroll-like sheets of paper hanging from the wall, which really convey the power of the techniques she’s developed. And they are both trumped by an enormous semi-transparent hanging fabric on which she has printed the bark of what looks like a plane tree and which divides the room in half (you can see the three smaller framed works behind it). Wow. Visually and physically stunning. What a great idea. So simple but so effective.
Installation view of Seungwon Jung at TPG New Talent 19 at the Photographers’ Gallery
Adama Jalloh (b. 1993, UK)
Adama Jalloh is a black woman photographer from South London and her work:
explores themes such as identity, race and culture.
Jalloh’s work is straight-up, black-and-white, social documentary photography, and very good, too. There’s a sequence recording a ‘Sara’, an Islamic custom in the Sierra Leonean community that involves Imams praying for a deceased family member or friend. Offerings of traditional food and money are given and condolences are expressed. Visitors are also allocated matching fabrics (known as Ashobi) which they can style to their individual taste.
Photos by Adama Jalloh
If you do a Google image search or go to Jalloh’s website, you’ll quickly see how all her photos are immediately evocative and characterful, conveying a powerful feel for black people and communities.
Frankly the half dozen photos here easily stand out as beautifully composed and printed, but lest this section be ‘merely’ about photography, there’s an interactive element. There are some headphones hanging on a hook, which we’re meant to put on so we can listen to an audio conversation between family members spoken in the Krio and English languages.
Chiara Avagliano (b.1988, Italy)
Chiara Avagliano’s work is another combination of photographs with sculpture and other materials.
All the works here relate to ‘Val Paradiso’, an imaginary valley created by Avagliano and based on real locations from her childhood in Northern Italy. The valley is the setting for a semi-fictional coming-of-age tale told from different points of view and ‘explores the rituals of female friendship, childhood, mythology and make-believe’.
The photos themselves are big, colour and entirely conventional, if haunting.
Val Paradiso by Chiara Avagliano
At the heart of Val Paradiso is a magical lake, Lake Tovel, which turns red in the summer months. By this stage I wasn’t sure what was fact, fiction or magical realism in this display, but I didn’t care. It’s fun. Apparently, Avagliano collaborated with her sister and friends to stage events from the fictional stories and photographed themselves doing it, which explains some of the images here.
And not all of them are photographs. There are a few contour maps of the valley in cases fixed to the wall, and in a big display case a wooden model of the mythical lake.
Model of the mythical lake at the heart of Val Paradiso by Chiara Avagliano
Once I’d understood the intention, I liked this project. It doesn’t have the dramatic impact of Seungwon Jung’s bark hangings, or the vivid street vibe of Adama Jalloh’s black Londoners, or the elegant surrealism of Giovanna Petrocchi’s altered museum pieces.
But the idea is simple and haunting, and the photos are wonderfully atmospheric. I can imagine it being a really good piece of teenage girl fiction, of the kind my teenage daughter reads (and sometimes lends to me).
The artists’ websites
- Rhiannon Adam website
- Chiara Avagliano’s website
- Alberto Feijóo’s website
- Adama Jalloh’s website
- Seungwon Jung’s website
- Alice Myers website
- Giovanna Petrocchi’s website
- Miguel Proença’s website
Curators
The TPG New Talent was selected by Jim Goldberg, curated by Karen McQuaid, art direction and graphic design is by Sarah Boris.
Demographics
The exhibition is housed in two rooms on the fifth floor of the Photographers’ Gallery. When I visited, at one o’clock on a Wednesday, it was completely empty, which was very restful on a hot day in central London but not, I imagine, what the Photographers’ Gallery like to see.
Related links
- TPG New Talent 19 continues at the Photographers’ Gallery until 6 October 2019
- TPG New Talent web page with artist biographies and YouTube interviews with them all
Books & Boots 