The artists nominated by
The two artists selected by Photo Elysée for FUTURES in 2024 are Olga Cafiero and Thaddé Comar. Both studied in Lausanne and have been followed by the museum since their early works. Both break with conventional representations to explore our relationship to history and memory through powerful visual approaches.
In Flora Neocomensis, Olga Cafiero explores a specific regional heritage (the Canton of Neuchâtel in Switzerland) by investigating its relationship with its flora. She creates an herbarium that combines botany, scientific imagery and history. She condenses visual languages and approaches to nature in a new poetic and meticulous inventory of a living heritage. Thaddé Comar focuses on the link between images and information in a context of resistance. Can we still trust images? In How was your dream?, he aims to deliver a new perspective on the 2019 revolts in Hong Kong and provides a strictly visual testimony.
Both Cafiero and Comar share a common practice which takes its meaning through hanging and editing, where images find a shape through matter and textures. They stand at fertile crossroads between various visual approaches and synthesise them, with the intention of bringing new perspectives to the viewer.
The two artists selected by Photo Elysée for FUTURES in 2024 are Olga Cafiero and Thaddé Comar. Both studied in Lausanne and have been followed by the museum since their early works. Both break with conventional representations to explore our relationship to history and memory through powerful visual approaches.
In Flora Neocomensis, Olga Cafiero explores a specific regional heritage (the Canton of Neuchâtel in Switzerland) by investigating its relationship with its flora. She creates an herbarium that combines botany, scientific imagery and history. She condenses visual languages and approaches to nature in a new poetic and meticulous inventory of a living heritage. Thaddé Comar focuses on the link between images and information in a context of resistance. Can we still trust images? In How was your dream?, he aims to deliver a new perspective on the 2019 revolts in Hong Kong and provides a strictly visual testimony.
Both Cafiero and Comar share a common practice which takes its meaning through hanging and editing, where images find a shape through matter and textures. They stand at fertile crossroads between various visual approaches and synthesise them, with the intention of bringing new perspectives to the viewer.
Born in 1987 in Russia, Olga is a multimedia artist creating her projects in Uzbekistan, her mother’s homeland. She graduated from Moscow Industrial Art Institute in 2013. In her works Olga uses a variety of media - from subject art, installations, and performance to social research and cinema. She addresses the topic of her female genealogy: both her grandmother and mother came from Uzbekistan. Olga treats this country as a timeless space, a portal where she finds answers to questions.
In her first projects she started from classic art forms - subject art, performances and photographs, and applied mixed media method in her current project Mirage - installation, social research, movie technics. This is a social research project about the Aral Sea disaster and the people living in it‘s aftermath. The starting point was the idea to suggest the locals in the town of Muynak, a former seaport, sharing one ceramic plate and laying out a mirage on the bottom of the dried Aral Sea near the town. The results of which were expressed in an installation on the bottom of the extinct sea and a full-lengthy film Olga created while working on the project. Also working in this vein, by her own, she explores female artist possibilities in a contemporary traditional society.
“My work is a path from small forms to large ones, from serious mental practice to an intuitive and free play method. My life has become an indispensable part of this conscious philosophical method. Last project Mirage can serve as an illustration of this approach. Here I play a game in which the object turns into a tool to communicate with the whole country.”
Thaddé Comar, a Franco-Swiss photographer born in 1993, graduated with distinction from ECAL in Lausanne in 2018. His work is deeply intertwined with current events and social movements, reflecting a profound commitment to contemporary issues. Today, his portfolio spans from editorial to commissioned work, as well as personal projects where he delves into the nuances and facets of our ever-evolving society.
