Artist
Sheng-Wen Lo
Sheng-Wen Lo (b. 1987) was born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and lives and works in Leiden, the Netherlands. Lo's works investigate the relationships between non-humans and contemporary society through a range of media, including images, installations, and games. He is an alumnus of the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, and received an MSc in Computer Science from National Taiwan University. His works have been shown at Foam and World Press Photo in the Netherlands; The International Center of Photography in the USA; MMCA in South Korea; The National Gallery of Victoria in Australia; and the Taiwan Biennial, Taiwan. He was selected as a Foam Talent in 2021, and has received fellowships from De Nederlandsche Bank and the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds/Prince Claus Fund. Lo is represented by Avocado Art Lab, Taipei.
Watch Out
Watch Out is a large-scale treasure hunting game deployed in the natural surroundings of Arles. In the Natural Regional Parks of Camargue and Alpilles, collisions with motor vehicles kill many animals every day, including birds, mammals, reptiles and insects. The local government has been encouraging drivers to slow down, but often to no avail. In response, I created a treasure hunt – a temporary scenario to re-establish the line of sight between humans and the surrounding environment. With jewellery designer Ching-Hui Yang (TW/NL), we crafted ten unique pieces based on roadkill discovered in these regions, placing them near the sites where the animals were found. The overall jewellery collection has an estimated market value of over €50,000, and each piece becomes the property of whoever finds it.
Down
While shopping for winter jackets, I realised that it’s impossible for me to tell where exactly the feathers of mass-produced down jackets came from. Therefore, I attempted to make my own down jacket in a relatively harmless way: by manually collecting the goose feathers on the grounds in parks, riverbanks and forests near my house in Breda, the Netherlands.
After two months of collecting, cleaning, filling and sewing, the jacket was put to the test over three weeks in the High Arctic – to see if I could survive. During a sailing expedition of The Arctic Circle Residency, I made 21 landings and glacier hikes wearing only this jacket and minimal base layers. A how-to guide – A Step by Step Guide for Making Your Own Down Jacket – was designed based on my experiences to allow everyone to make a similar garment where they live.
What attracts FOTODOK to the works of Sheng-Wen Lo and Tanja Engelberts is their absolute freedom of working with media: both employ not only photography, but also video, sound, words, and sculpture. In her latest work We exhale (2022-2023), Engelberts translates her images into sculptural planes made out of clay and finished with a glaze sourced from The Rhône river, while Lo , in her project Watch Out! (2022-2023) initiates a sort of jewellery treasure hunt game, based on the documentation of roadkills in the Camargue area. Both residents of The Rijksakademie, Amsterdam from 2019-2021, Lo and Engelberts have worked independently on subjects including ecology and non-human perspectives, while also often collaborating.
Yana Kononova started working on the project Radiations of War (2022) immediately after the Russian Federation began a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine on the 24th February 2022 – a new turn in a war that first broke out in 2014. Using a medium format camera, she captures pictures of war crimes, destroyed infrastructure, the activities of various Ukrainian services, the bodies of fallen warriors, and the victims among the civilian population. Once you have seen her images you can’t un-see them – monumental and powerful, they stay with the viewer.
Michelle Piergoelam and Sebastian Koudijzer both have roots in Surinam and investigate the traditions and rituals of their families and cultures. Piergoelam works with myths and tales and in her latest project Songs in a strange land (2022), she works with songs, and the colonial history they keep traces of. Koudijzer is interested in rituals and the search for community and belonging. In Kampong Tori (2021-ongoing), together with his brother, the artist spends time with their retired grandparents in the garden community of Beukhoeve, Rotterdam, cooking Javanese-Surinamese dishes together, and in time, the food becomes a starting point for conversation, evoking memories, and piecing familial narratives together.