Artist
Euridice Zaituna Kala
Born in Maputo, Euridice Zaituna Kala (1987) is an artist based in Paris. She was trained as a photographer at the Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg.
Recent monographic exhibition includes: Untitled, ADN_ Sea(e)scapes, 2021 at galerie Salon H, Paris, and I, the Archive,2020, at Villa Vassilieff, Paris. Kala’s most recent group exhibitions include: This is Not Africa, unlearn what you have learned, 2021 at Aros Museum, Denmark, Un.e air.e de famille, 2021, at Museum Paul Elourd, Saint-Denis, France, Polyphony, 2021 at Gera Museum, Gera, Germany. Kala’s most recent performances include: Stranger, Danger, Wait it’s a Prayer Room, Centre Pompidou, 2019, Mackandal Turns into a Butterfly: A Love potion (2018), Le Pouvoir du Dedans, La galerie Cac de Noisy-le-Sec (2018), Euridice Zaituna Kala Shows and Doesn’t Tell, galerie Saint-Severin (2018). She is the winner of the ADAGP/ Villa Vassilieff Fellowship 2019-2020, a finalist of the SAM art Prix (2018) and also a finalist for the prize for contemporary talent, François Schneider Foundation (2018). Kala’s work will be included in the 5th Casablanca Biennial, Morroco, and she an artist in residency at Urbane Kuenst Ruhr in Germany in 2019-2020. She is the founder and co-organiser of e.a.s.t. (Ephemeral Archival Station), a lab and platform for long-term artistic research projects, established in 2017.
Je suis l’archive, I the Archive
Extract of the Exhibition text:
Invited by the ADAGP (Association for the Development of the Graphic and Visual Arts), Villa Vassilieff and Bibliothèque Kandinsky to work with the Marc Vaux's collection, Euridice Zaituna Kala has herself become the archive. Euridice has enthusiastically taken on this new role by searching for familiar figures from her memories and personal set of references: Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, her father Getúlio Mario Kala...
Euridice Zaituna Kala’s glasswork allows her to develop a quasi-physical connection with Vaux’s archive, by reusing the material the photographer used to create the images in his collection: the negatives from Marc Vaux’s view camera are mounted on glass plates treating the archive. Euridice has engraved and drawn her own image and memories on rectangular pieces of glass that resemble those from the archive, as if adding to Vaux’s collection by reinserting bodies that were excluded from it. However, the artist chooses to work on the glass with materials that fade over time or disappear, highlighting the fragility of our archives and the precariousness of our attempts to record our histories. Glass, as a material, exemplifies this fragility: how many negatives must have been lost by falling or through other accidents?
By becoming the archive, Euridice gathers, sorts and interprets information according to its affective value rather than its historical relevance. Becoming the archive means reclaiming power by writing history free of institutional norms. It means shedding light on people and geographical areas who have been deliberately excluded from historical accounts and giving visibility to groups of people who have been forgotten by hegemonic narratives. “I became this other power that was going to foreground whatever I wanted and however I wanted to portray it, regardless of how it has been established in existing archives.” By approaching the archive through her individual subjectivity and focusing on people she is intimately connected to, the artist attempts to develop a plural, personal and deviant manner of recounting history.
As Euridice browsed the Marc Vaux’s collection, images of a model Aïcha Goblet, sketches of Josephine Baker by Jean de Botton and two portraits of unknown nude Black models. The artist was drawn to these “familiar” bodies which resembled her own. Euridice reflected on these bodies’ presence in these photographs and their absence from the archives from which monolithic narratives of modern art have been constructed. Rather than reproducing these photographs in her exhibition, the artist instead chose to use narration to draw attention to the bodies frozen and framed in these images – trapped by the projections and fantasies of others.
Camile Chenais - Exhibition curator
The curatorial team of the 8th Triennale has selected five emerging Futures artists in the field of photography who have particularly caught their eye:
What is Hien Hoang’s recipe? For me, it’s the mix of ingredients: Using still-life photography, surrealism and performance, she addresses clichés and prejudices about Asia. Her photos are bursting with exotic beauty, but a closer look reveals abysses that shake up ways of seeing and thinking. (nominated by Stephanie Bunk)
Engaging flows of history and social relation, Euridice Kala deploys the photographic image as a central means of meaning-making. Her artistic practice mines the fraught memories of the Atlantic slave trade and colonial-era Mozambique through the form of installations, performances, and publications. She is invested in the capacity of the archive to generate conceptual possibilities, and pursues these avenues from a Black feminist African perspective. (nominated by Oluremi C. Onabanjo)
Marco Kesseler is a UK-based British photographer with an interest in portrai- ture and the social stories of food security and agricultural infrastructures. Kesseler has a profoundly tender presence as a photographer. From his quiet portraits of daily life in Belarus in the run up the 2015 presidential election to his recent series on the role of seasonal work in the UK largely fulfilled by migrant workers whose labour is likely to be unprotected by Brexit legislation, the quiet resolve of Kesseler’s photographs resist dominant narratives of place, nationhood and nativist independence. (nominated by Gabriella Beckhurst)
Johanna Terhechte is exceptionally curious about the world and driven to undertake challenges. She is a thoughtful artist and a compassionate human being, two underrated character traits in artists. (nominated by Rasha Salti)
Laura Van Severen is a Belgian photographer based between Barcelona and Ghent. She is a promising talent who has, in her latest projects, taken a thorough look at the transformation of landscape and environment. Strata (2020) is an investigation of the effect of landfill and waste management, having traveled to Spain, Belgium, Romania, Portugal and the Netherlands. In this series, Laura maps a representative selection of altered ecosystems that are the pure consequence of our abusive system of consumption. With aesthetic sensibility, she blends artistic and journalistic approaches, pointing at harsh realities of our times with poetic means. With this nomination, I’d like to reinforce her courage working on complex, research-based photographic projects, as well as supporting her persistent aspiration to reconnect us with nature and with each other through diverse exhibition formats. (nominated by Cale Garrido)